Memory in the Middle Ages: Approaches from Southwestern Europe 9781641892636

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CARMEN MONOGRAPHS AND STUDIES Series Editors Andrea Vanina Neyra, CONICET, Buenos Aires Jitske Jasperse, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin Kathleen Neal, Monash University Alice Sullivan, University of Michigan Further Information and Publications www.arc-humanities.org/our-series/arc/cvm/

MEMORY IN THE MIDDLE AGES APPROACHES FROM SOUTHWESTERN EUROPE

Edited by

FLOCEL SABATÉ

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Introduction. Memory in the Middle Ages FLOCEL SABATÉ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

PART ONE: MEMORY AND SCIENCE

Chapter 1. Memory and the Body in Medi­eval Medicine FERNANDO SALMÓN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Chapter 2. James I of Aragon, Vicent Ferrer, and Francesc Eiximenis: Natural Memory and Artificial Memory XAVIER RENEDO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

PART TWO: MEMORY OF THE PAST AS IDENTITY

Chapter 3. History, Memory, and Ideas about the Past in the Early Middle Ages ROSAMOND McKITTERICK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Chapter 4. Charter Writing and Documentary Memory in the Origins of Catalan History MICHEL ZIMMERMANN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Chapter 5. The Memory of Saints in the Hispanic Translationes of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries ARIEL GUIANCE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

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Chapter 6. Establishing a Memory in Medi­eval Spain ADELINE RUCQUOI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Chapter 7. The Legend of the Princess of Navarre: A Founding Myth in the Sardinian Conflict against the Kings of Aragon LUCIANO GALLINARI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

PART THREE: MEMORY AND POWER

Chapter 8. Memory of the State or Memory of the Kingdom? A Comparative Approach to the Construction of Memory in France and England JEAN-PHILIPPE GENET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Chapter 9. Art to Seal the Memory: Coronation Ceremonies and the Sword as Symbol of Power (Aragon, 1200–1400) MARTA SERRANO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Chapter 10. Architecture and Legacy in Medi­eval Navarre JAVIER MARTÍNEZ DE AGUIRRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

Chapter 11. Family Memory in Late Medi­eval Catalonia: The Marcs, Lords of Eramprunyà MIREIA COMAS-VIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

PART FOUR: MEMORY AND COMMEMORATING THE DEAD

Chapter 12. The Tomb as Tool for Keeping Memory Alive: The Case of Late Medi­eval Zaragoza ANA DEL CAMPO GUTIÉRREZ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Chapter 13. Wills, Tombs, and Preparation for a Good Death in Late Medi­eval Portugal MARTA MIRIAM RAMOS DIAS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Chapter 14. Ceremonial Topo­graphy in the Consueta Antiga of the Cathedral of Mallorca ANTONI PONS CORTÈS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313



PART FIVE: REMEMBERING THE MIDDLE AGES

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Chapter 15. Memory and Identity in Catalan-Aragonese Sardinia from 1323 to the Present ESTHER MARTÍ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Chapter 16. Nineteenth-Century French Legal History and the Memory of the Middle Ages LUIS ROJAS DONAT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Chapter 17. Spolia and Memory in Nineteenth-Century Venice MYRIAM PILUTTI NAMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379

Chapter 18. Neo-Medi­evalism and the Anchoring of New Spatial Identities: Linking New Regional and Urban Identities with Medi­eval Memories KEES TERLOUW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393

Chapter 19. The Hegemony of the Cult of Anniversaries and its Disadvantages for Historians WILLIAM M. JOHNSTON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 9.1: Seals of Peter II of Aragon (1207, 1212) and James I of Aragon (1220–1226). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Figure 9.2: Coronats of James I of Aragon: Valencia, Barcelona, and Aragon (1236–1276). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Figure 9.3: Seals of James I of Aragon (1220–1226 and 1238–1276). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Figure 9.4: Lead seals of James I of Aragon (after 1231). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Figure 9.5: Shrine of James I of Aragon, the contents of the tomb, the original one, with the now-vanished sword from the fourteenth century, and the image on the tomb. Poblet, Monastery of Saint Maria of Poblet. . . . . . . 241 Figure 9.6: The Imperial Sword, eleventh century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Figure 9.7: Pere Bernés, Ral of Peter the Ceremonious of Aragon and drawing in enamel on reliquary of St. George, fourteenth century. Valencia, Museo Catedral de Valencia. . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Figure 9.8: Genealogy of Poblet, detail, ca. 1410. Poblet, Monastery of Saint Maria de Poblet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 Figure 9.9: Pere Nisart, Predella from the Altarpiece of St. George, detail, ca. 1470, Palma, Museu d’Art Sacre de Mallorca. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 Figure 9.10: Miquel Alcanyiç, Marçal de Sas, and other painters, altarpiece of Centenar de la Ploma, detail, ca. 1409–1410, London, Victoria and Albert Museum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Figure 13.1: Tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monastery of Alcobaça. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302 Figure 13.2: Tomb of Inês de Castro, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monastery of Alcobaça. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

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List of Illustrations

Figure 13.3: Tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monastery of Alcobaça. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Figure 13.4: Tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, detail of the representation of the administration of the viaticum, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monastery of Alcobaça. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 Figure 13.5: Tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, detail of the king and clergy at prayer, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monas­tery of Alcobaça. . . . . . . . . . . 305 Figure 13.6: Tomb of an unknown bishop, fourteenth century. Ourense, Cathedral of Ourense. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Figure 13.7: Tomb of an unknown bishop, detail of more distinguished figures meaning higher ranks of the church, fourteenth century. Ourense, Cathedral of Ourense. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Figure 13.8: Tomb of Lope de Fontecha in the chapel of Saint Gregory, 1351. Burgos, Cathedral of Burgos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Figure 13.9: Tomb of Lope de Fontecha in the chapel of Saint Gregory, detail of a real funeral taking place, 1351. Burgos, Cathedral of Burgos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Figure 13.10: Tomb of Lope de Fontecha in the chapel of Saint Gregory, detail of one of the clergymen holding a processional cross and another in an attitude of mourning, 1351. Burgos, Cathedral of Burgos. . . . . . . 307 Figure 13.11: Master Pero of Coimbra and Telo Garcia of Lisbon, tomb in the chapel of Saint Mary. Braga, Cathedral of Braga. . . . . . . . . . . 310 Figure 13.12: Master Pero of Coimbra and Telo Garcia of Lisbon, tomb in the chapel of Saint Mary, right wall of the ark, 1334. Braga, Cathedral of Braga. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Figure 14.1: Heraldic shields from the Consueta Antiga, fourteenth century. Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, Capbreus, còdexs i repetoris, 3403. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317



List of Illustrations

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Figure 14.2: Anniversary of Jaume de Prades, fourteenth century. Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, Capbreus, còdexs i repetoris, 3403. . . . . . . . . . . . . 318 Figure 14.3: Canals for water of the Madîna Mayûrqa during the caliphal period. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 Figure 14.4: Roman network of roads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Figure 14.5: Former chapel of St. Catherine, with the entrance to the bell tower in the background, 1404. Palma, Catedral de Mallorca. . . . . . . . . . 324 Figure 14.6: Hypothetical reconstruction of the cathedral precinct and location of altars, ca. 1370. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326

Figure 18.1: Legitimation through backward and forward selectivity of iconic sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404

FOREWORD FLOCEL SABATÉ

Memory was everything in the Middle Ages: it was vital to the functioning of

medi­eval society. Christian religion was experienced on the basis that the biblical narrative and the lives of the saints were accepted as historical truths; sovereigns held their domains by invoking dynasties that dated back to the origins of humanity; while families, both noble and bourgeois, and even collective identities, such as that of cities and nations, justified their existence through stories that guaranteed their deep and unbroken historical roots. Memory was the record of a past taken as a basis for identity. Thus, it had both a collective and an individualized aspect. In the twelfth century, Chrétien de Troyes explained how the Knight of the Lion lost his human behaviour until he recovered his memory and, with it, his identity. Remembering was necessary to human existence. Only by doing so could the present be endowed with meaning, allowing the individual to adopt a way of life leading to parousia (salvation), and avoiding temptations and false messiahs. Thus, memory was vital to medi­eval personhood when understood holistically and was a notable trait at both the individual and collective levels. Rulers wielding different kinds of power (political, religious, and so on) attempted to consolidate their position by promoting specific visions and records of the past that would help form a shared memory. This book sets out from this expansive definition of memory, which incorporates both personal and public aspects of the term in line with common contemporary scholarly understandings of the word.1 History and memory were intertwined. It was important to follow the logic of a certain thread from the past to justify the prevailing order in the present. In light of this, exploring the manifestations of memory can be used by historians as a prism through which to penetrate the value system of a particular culture; thus, this volume uses memory as a means of analyzing the European Middle Ages. This project’s two companion volumes deal with the allied concepts of identity and ideo­logy as part of a larger project that seeks to map and interrogate the significance of all three in the Middle Ages in Western Europe. Put simply, we understand people in medi­eval societies to have shared an identity based on commonly held memories functioning according to particular ideo­ logies. Our contribution to the renewal of historical analysis lies in treating these concepts as intersecting paths of study. Consequently, the fruits of our combined research show ways these three concepts provide valuable tools for the researcher of past societies. We find this a useful path for approaching an understanding of the values and interpretative axes that informed the thinking of women and men in the Middle Ages. 1  This is in line with the way Carruthers analyzes “individual memory” and “public memory” in Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medi­eval Culture (Cam­bridge, 1990).

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Such an integrated approach requires interdisciplinarity, as opposed to the academic compartmentalization of history, art history, and the study of languages and literatures. To face this challenge, we present a collective work structured in a particular way, beginning with a long introductory chapter on medi­eval memory by Flocel Sabaté. This introduction does not aim to map out memory in its entirety, but rather to provide insights into key aspects of medi­eval understandings of memory. It discusses the way memory was defined and understood as a natural faculty. Only by remembering, it was believed, were individual humans able to attain their true position within society and as God’s creatures; thus the capacity to recall was vital and required stimulation in order to ensure its good functioning. However, precisely what it was important to remember was dictated by the various holders of power. From this, we can observe political uses of memory and the way strategies of remembering are always oriented to suit particular interests, within an ideo­logy of power. Having established an overview of memory in the Middle Ages, the introduction is followed by nineteen focused chapters from leading researchers, all of which delve deeper into specific fields. Brought together for the common goal of illuminating medi­eval thought, these studies focus on concrete cases, highlighting exemplars from southern Europe, a region with a large amount of documentation but which to date has occupied a relatively minor position in the overall diffusion of research into the Middle Ages. This emphasis is acknowledged in the title of this book, Memory in the Middle Ages: Approaches from Southwestern Europe, offered as a means of enriching and deepening our study of the Middle Ages. The resulting chapters have been organized according to five fields relevant to the way memory was structured in the Middle Ages: memory and its function in relation to science; the use of memory of the past in the construction of identity; the incorporation of memory into the mechanisms of power; the use of memory in the familial and social rituals around death and religious belief; and finally, control of how the Middle Ages has been remembered by subsequent generations in order to justify ideo­logical positions. Let me first summarize the chapters in this volume and indicate how, to my mind, they develop an overall picture of the topic at hand. Given that memory in the Middle Ages was a highly valued physio­logical function, it is logical that the first section focuses on the relation between memory and medi­eval science, beginning with a study by ­Fernando Salmón on how the working and location of memory within the human body was accounted for. In view of memory’s vital importance in retaining knowledge, educating through preaching, and correctly executing the duties linked to one’s position in society, a second study by Xavier Renedo delves into the mnemonic formulae adopted by leading moralists and preachers. Public recourse to memory led to the development of shared, social uses that looked back to the past, recalling and evoking it with significations held in common by most members of society. The first chapter in the second section (“Memory of the Past as Identity”) is Rosamund McKitterick’s analysis of the relation between memory and written records of memory in the Early Middle Ages. We are able to see how the authorities’ repeated invocation of the past played an important role in the construction of a common identity based on selective use of memory. It was manipulated through public forms of remembrance and commemoration, while formulaic inscriptions were used to



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sustain the significant relation between certain dead people and the living. In the following chapter, Michel Zimmermann uses the particular case of Catalonia, a country with high levels of documentation for the Early and High Middle Ages, to examine the development of a common stock of memories based on a specific and limited set of interpretations of its myths of foundation. As Adeline Rucquoi demonstrates, a similar use of the past developed over time in Castile during the Middle Ages, although with very different traits. Here, literary works adapted these foundational myths to establish and popularize the supposedly very ancient origins of Spain. Successful use of the past often required not only persuasive narratives but also material evidence from which to generate a memory with sufficient resonance to propogate a social identity built on a specific ideo­logy. This was the role fulfilled by relics, the reason both ecclesiastical and royal powers were concerned with controlling and managing these. This is the subject of Ariel Guiance’s analysis of the Iberian Peninsula, which, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, experienced specific translationes: the transfer and relocation of various relics. Beyond invoking supposed common origins and seeking the protection of those objects that were deemed authentic, there was the potential for engaging an entire community in observing the rituals of a shared memory through a supposedly historical account. This is the topic of Luciano Gallinari’s work on the case of fourteenth-century Sardinia, where, in resisting the claims of the Crown of Aragon, the Giudice of Arborea presented himself as endowed with the right not only to rule the island but also to represent its identity. His claim was strengthened by a link to the distant royal family of Navarre, owing to a princess who by chance had reached the island in the eleventh century. This judge invoked and successfully appropriated the memory of a supposed history to promote a specific expression of a collective identity in a fraught political context. Memory and power are clearly often closely interrelated and this is the focus of the third part of the book. It starts with Jean-Philippe Genet’s analysis of two contrasting ways of building the memory of sovereign power: those of France and England. While in the former, during the Late Middle Ages a memory of kingdom was elaborated, England held a memory of the kings themselves. In fact both ways ultimately converged in the generation of national fervour and the consolidation of states based on a specific memory. This was sustained by various rites of legitimation, which were used to underwrite memory. Marta Serrano analyses the case of Aragon, where the royal crown, the sword, and the help of certain saints were all enlisted to bolster memory. One effective way of establishing memory that justified power was to build a consistent and longterm architectural legacy. Javier Martínez de Aguirre studies the case of the sovereigns of Navarre, and the particular religious and civil constructions erected, especially in the fifteenth century, to justify a monarchy represented on the walls of these buildings through inscriptions and the royal coats of arms. Memory was of use to anyone who held power and wished to retain it. Consequently, diverse strategies were employed by baronial and bourgeois lineages to build their own distinct family memories, as Mireia Comas-Via demonstrates with reference to the case of the Catalan Marcs family. Recording the past involves interrogating links with the deceased, and this is the subject of the fourth part of the book: “Memory and Commemorating the Dead.” Ana del Campo’s analysis proceeds from tombs in the city of Zaragoza. The reliefs on the graves

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served to maintain a perpetual memory of the rise of each lineage, thereby inextricably linking religion to the care of souls and the pre-eminence of the historical line and its power. Wills and tombs also communicate the memory of the rites done to save the soul according to the late-medi­eval guidelines for a good death. In this sense, these rites had not only a religious function but also helped disseminate a memory of the deceased, establishing prayers and acts that needed to be repeated continuously, sometimes even over the tomb, as Marta Miriam Ramos Dias describes with cases in Portugal and Castile. Perpetual masses, like anniversaries, had to be carried out formally in a church to assure the eternal salvation of the deceased, and thereby became a permanent record of the dead. Moreover, since they occupied specific locations within churches, one can think in terms of a topo­graphy of memory, as Antoni Pons Cortès argues with reference to the cathedral of Mallorca. Thus, memory was a tool for managing and ruling society in the Middle Ages. Centuries later it would also be used as a tool to influence certain social and political perspectives on the past. Accordingly, we dedicate the last part of the book to “Remembering the Middle Ages.” In some instances, we find elements from a past that have to some extent modelled the present. This is what Esther Martí explores in the case of Sardinia, which saw its identity strongly modified by Catalan influence in the fourteenth century, when the island was incorporated into the Crown of Aragon. Diverse elements including institutions, the customs of everyday life, and cultural heritage recall a memory of a past that has contributed to a specific identity, retained across the centuries. It is precisely its distance that makes the Middle Ages ideal for projecting a shifting and flexible set of memories, either of barbarity or civilization. Memory of the Middle Ages was also a subject of discussion among nineteenth-century authors, as Luis Rojas Donat explores. The uncritical appropriation of the Middle Ages as an ideal past can inspire its use in creating a new present, even in physical manifestations. As Myriam Pilutti Namer shows, this is very clear in reforms applied in the nineteenth century to Venice, a city whose political status was in regular flux and was in need of reexpressing its identity. The term neo-medi­evalism has been used to define these aesthetic expressions at the end of the nineteenth century, for trying to recover some supposed memory of a medi­eval model. A century later, at the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, the same term has acquired another meaning among some researchers. These scholars (socio­logists, political scientists) have responded to new political and social situations in Europe, which seems to be leading the continent to dispersal of power on different political levels, porous borders, and fluid and adaptable identities. It may not be so different, then, from the one that characterized the Middle Ages. This is the reason neo-medi­evalism has received a new meaning in some circles, as an intellectual movement that looks back to some aspects of the medi­eval political model to feed a debate on how to organize society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Kees Terlouw analyzes this new concept of a medi­eval memory, used as a model to build better societies. Clearly, the Middle Ages should be approached with prudence, because uses and abuses of commemorations in western Europe can hinder understandings of the period under study. The cult of anniversaries could become a trap for historians, as William M. Johnston warns. As researchers, our aim is not to identify a definitive memory of the



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Middle Ages; rather, we seek to build understanding of the functioning of memory in society in that period. This set of chapters were carefully selected by the Consolidated Medi­eval Studies Research Group “Space Power and Culture,” based at the Uni­ver­sity of Lleida, through the research project Identity, Memory, and Ideo­logy in the Middle Ages (HAR-2009–08598/ HIST), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The project aimed to promote understanding of, and research into, the Middle Ages from three perspectives: identity, memory and ideo­logy, understanding that the relations of these interlinked concepts to medi­eval society are a way for researchers to dig further into this period. Various complementary research projects funded by the Spanish government contributed to this publication, specifically with regard to the different meanings of medi­eval memory: Memories From the Past: Uses and Traditions of Classical Literatures in Medi­eval Literature (FFI-2009–0680-E); Identity, Memory and Writing in the Middle Ages (FFI2010–12260-E) and Memory in the Middle Ages (HAR-2010–12231-E/HIST). This facilitated an ongoing framework for study, with several research meetings held in Lleida enabling different aspects of medi­eval memory to be tackled between 2009 and 2014. Several edited publications are a legacy of this work.2 Our research framework favoured intensive interdisciplinary work that integrated the contributions of historians, art historians, and philo­logists from different geo­ graphical backgrounds, and diverse traditions and schools. This volume (and its two companion volumes) is the latest in a rich seam of publications that we believe will be the seed for promoting ongoing research. In an effort to make the work in these volumes accessible to as broad an academic audience as possible, all original source texts have been translated into English, with the source quoted in the footnotes. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations have been provided by the contributors and editor of this volume. In producing, selecting, revising, and bringing to fruition the final texts in this volume, the research project Feelings, Emotion, and Expressivity (financed by the Spanish government as project HAR–2016–75028–P), the ICREA–Academia award to Flocel Sabaté (2016–2020), and Arc Humanities Press’s peer review and pre-press processes have all been crucial, for which we are sincerely grateful. We hope that this volume, together with Identity in the Middle Ages: Approaches from Southwestern Europe and Ideo­logy in the Middle Ages: Approaches from Southwestern Europe, will illuminate the links between identity, memory, and ideo­logy in the Middle Ages, and open new pathways to how we interrogate and understand the Middle Ages.3

2  Especially Josep Antoni Clua, Flocel Sabaté, eds., Usos i tradició de les literatures clàssiques a les literatures medi­evals (Lleida, 2013); Isabel Grifoll, Julián Acebrón, and Flocel Sabaté, eds., Cartografies de l’ànima. Identitat, memòria i escriptura (Lleida, 2014); Flocel Sabaté, ed., La formació de la personalitat a l’edat mitjana (Lleida, 2016).

3  Translations into English are generally provided as close to the original text as possible, and the original text and edited source is provided in the notes. We follow the press’s practice as a global publisher in retaining native forms as far as possible. Abbreviations to sources from the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (hereafter MGH) follow the guidelines to the Deutsche Archiv journal: www.mgh.de/fileadmin/Downloads/pdf/DA-Siglenverzeichnis.pdf.

Introduction

MEMORY IN THE MIDDLE AGES FLOCEL SABATÉ

These words, written

“Christianity is found in the Gospels and in the lives of the saints.”1

in Barcelona in 1417 by Violant de Bar, the queen dow­ager of John I of Aragon, defined Christianity as a compendium of historical events which form an exemplar for life: the narrative events in the Gospels and the lives of the saints. Throughout the Middle Ages, memory, a compendium of what was recalled from the past, became the essential basis for one’s own identity and for establishing strategies to consolidate the future. Medi­eval, particularly Christian, society gave great importance to memory; this chapter features this importance. It shows how memory penetrated all aspects of human relations, to the point that we can say life was memory. This led people of the Middle Ages to question the nature of memory, and so, in the second section of this introduction, we will see how medi­eval science interrogated the qualities of memory. The combination of these two aspects—the importance of memory in the lives of medi­ eval men and women and the efforts of medi­eval science to define and place the memory physio­logically—leads to a third point: the need to maintain and cultivate memory, the reason we dedicate the third section to the contemporary methods for stimulating the capacity to recall. It becomes clear that memory in the Middle Ages had a significant social dimension, which forces us to analyze it as a conscious strategy in the fourth section of this introduction. These social strategies ultimately reflect the powers-that-be, reinforcing their interests and dominant ideo­logy. The introduction concludes with a section illustrating what we could term a guided memory.

Life is Memory

Medi­eval confidence in the past was inherited from classical culture along with a mistrust of change, thought to be inferior to what went before: the ancient models should not be forgotten or altered. Tacitus, for instance, is very clear: “in all matters the arrangements of the past were better and fairer and that all changes were for the worse; ­everything 1  “Christianisme per force se trobe en Evangelis ne Vida de Sants.” From Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancelleria, Reg. 2052, fol. 29v; edited in Jaume Riera, Els poders publics i les sina­ gogues, segles xiii-xiv (Girona, 2006), 545.

Flocel Sabaté ([email protected]) is Professor of Medi­eval History at the Universitat de Lleida, Spain.

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that is transformed, changes for the worse.”2 The so-called Fathers of the Church, writing in the two first centuries of Christianity, established the bases from which a line of continuity was drawn. In the second century CE, Irenaeus of Lyon restricted true knowledge as delimited by the teachings of the Apostles, the order established by the Church, and the apostolic succession. Origins and historical continuity were based on the Gospels, as guarded and interpreted by the Church, who could define the true, correct historical narrative, and the development of history was maintained on earth under the bishops.3 Fourth-century Christianity conquered history, as it were, establishing historical truth by moving beyond biblical history, which till then defined Jewish identity and operated within Roman history. From then on, the history of the world, the history of the Church, and the history of salvation became one and the same.4 The Church proclaimed a religious model for society that was justified in a story of continuity from the creation of the world until the parousia.5 Consequently, the story around which society was built required the remembrance of historical continuity. We can see this in the Romanesque cloister of Aix-en-Provence, its capitals sculpted in the twelfth century successively showing the three phases of humanity: the Old Testament, the life of Jesus Christ, and the triumph of the Church in the Roman Empire.6 Christian religion is a record of a path: “Christian teaching is memory, Christian worship is commemoration.”7 Life was a path towards salvation: “we are all of us pilgrims who pass along the way” as the Castilian Gonzalo de Berceo stated in the thirteenth century.8 It was the past that gave meaning, not novelty, as expressed by Paien de Maisières (late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries): Today, the old paths are less appreciated than the new paths, because these are considered more beautiful, but they are only better in appearance; but it frequently occurs that the old ones are more appreciated.9

2  “Super omnibus negotiis melius atque rectitus olim provisum et quae converterentur in deterius mutari.” Cited from Tacitus, Annales, 14.43, accessed April 22, 2013, http://www.thelatinlibrary. com/tacitus/tac.ann14.shtml. Translation by Alfred J. Church and William J. Brodribb (London, 1882), available at http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.10.xiv.html, accessed May 20, 2020. 3  José Vives, Los padres de la Iglesia (Barcelona, 1982), 184.

4  Raúl González Salinero, “La idea de Romanitas en el pensamiento histórico-polí�tico de Pru­ dencio,” in Toga y daga. Teoría de la praxis de la política en Roma, ed. Gonzalo Bravo and Raúl Salinero (Madrid, 2009), 349–62 at 349–51.

5  Flocel Sabaté, “Els referents històrics de la societat: identitat i memòria,” in L’Edat Mitjana. Món real i espai imaginat, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Catarroja, 2012), 16–21.

6  http://www.provence-hors-des-sentiers-battus.com/2010/10/27/cloitre-de-la-cathedralesaint-saveur-aix-en-provence, accessed April 22 2013. 7  “L’enseignement chrétien est mémoire, le culte chrétien est commemoration.” Cited from Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris, 1988), 133. 8  “Todos somos romeus que camino pasamos.” Cited from Gonzalo de Berceo, Milagros de Nuestra Señora, ed. Fernando Baños (Barcelona, 2002), 13.

9  “Ahora son menos apreciados los viejos caminos que los nuevos, porque éstos se consideran más bellos, y solo son mejores en apariencia; pero ocurre con frecuencia que los viejos son más



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This does not prevent appreciating, with Anselm of Havelberg in the twelfth century, the benefits of novitas when it comes to improving the spirit and knowledge.10 Later, Bernat Metge comments, “people always enjoy new things.”11 This view did not alter an intellectual preference for the past, as shown in another fourteenth-century Catalonian text: Maximus states that old men praise things from the past and complain about those of the present, because our lives continually worsen; our parents’ times were worse than those of our grandparents, and ours are worse than our parents, and those of our children will be even more full of vices.12

So, one only looked to the future rooted in a strong connection with the past, a welldefined past with which one was permanently linked through memory. Reference to memory was consistent across the Middle Ages. Religion relied on evocative images, which held a central position in popular worship,13 endowed them with particular symbo­logy where, to a large extent, aesthetics, pedagogy, mimesis, and symbolism referred to events in the past.14 Constant recollection of biblical stories—particularly the martyrdoms or miracles of the saints—all of remembrance of which served to generate devotion. Most aptly, the medi­eval cathedral has been defined as “the theatre of the memory,” because the images are useful “against the ignorance of the simple people, against the inertia of the emotions, and against the weakness of the memory.”15 Similarly, when political power addressed its subjects, previous sovereigns had not faded into oblivion but were held in the memory. Like other characters worthy of remembrance, such as the members of the royal household, their mention was always accompanied by the invocation of their memory: “King James of good memory, lord King John of good memory, highest Lady Joan of good memory, the very noble King Henry of good memory.” The adjective “good” was occasionally varied; it could be “clear” memory, for example. Evidently, the monarchs spoke similarly about their ancestors; for example, apreciados.” Cited from Paien de Maisières, “La doncella de la mula,” in El caballero de la espada; la doncella la mula, ed. Isabel de Riquer (Madrid, 1984), 31.

10  Walter Edyvean, Anselm of Havelberg and the Theo­logy of History (Rome, 1972); Karl F. Morrison, “Anselm of Havelberg: Play and the Dilemma of Historical Progress,” in Religion, Culture and Society in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Richard E. Sullivan, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and John J. Contreni (Kalamazoo, 1987), 219–56.

11  “La gent tot temps s’alegra de novetats.” Cited from Bernat Metge, Lo somni, ed. Josep M. de Casacuberta and Lluis Nicolau d’Olwer (Barcelona, 1980), 28.

12  “Diu Maximià que·l hom vell loa les coses passades e blasma les presents per ço com nostra vida pijora contí�nuament, que les edats dels pares són pijors que dels avis e nós som pijors que nostres pares e encare seran nostres fills pus plens de vitis.” Cited from Documentos literarios en antigua lengua catalana (siglos xiv y xv), ed. Pròspero de Bofarull (Barcelona, 1857; 2nd ed. 1973), 186.

13  Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps des images. Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2002), 97–133. 14  Jèssica Jaques Pi, La estética del románico y el gótico (Boadilla del Monte, 2003), 160–241.

15  “Le théâtre de la mémoire; agissent contre l’ignorance des simples, contre l’inertie des émotions et contre la faiblaisse de la mémoire.” Cited from Roland Recht, Le croire et le voir. L’art des cathédrales (xiie-xve siècle) (Paris, 1999), 290.

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mentioning “lord King Peter of good memory our father” and referring, in general, to “our ancestors of laudable memory.”16 Meanwhile, daily life was based on the maintenance of agreements and undertakings from the past. Such documents recorded how affairs were organized and established at their outset. However, complete memory was a characteristic of the divine. Christ knew everything, which meant he held it in his memory, according to Ramon Llull: In the same way that the logical man has acquired the knowledge of logic through science, so our lord Jesus Christ in so far as he is man retains everything in the memory, and in so far as he is God has everything gathered under the habit created of the memory. Consequently, he remembers everything created, in so far as he is man and he is God; and so our lord Jesus Christ attends to and understands all the creatures, in so far as he is God and that he is a creature.17

So, although everybody has memory, only God has a memory of everything, which explains why he never errs: “clearly, to have a memory of everything but not to err in no way belongs rather to the divine than to the human.” Conversely, because they lack full and continuous memory, men, even kings, make mistakes, distracted by the numerous affairs of their reigns, as John I of Aragon explained in 1387.18 Consequently, good management of secular affairs depended on exercises to commit things to memory: reiterating statements, recalling topics related to current issues, and restating previous decisions.19 The same exercise in remembering was required in law courts: the witness’s memory was a vital element in trials.20 Given that it was often necessary to clarify the situation in disputes about rights, incomes, and possessions, witnesses were often asked for their records, as far back as they could take them. That happened, for example, in a trial in Girona in 1338, where a witness explained, “from his memory until now, he has seen that the court of the king held jurisdiction in the said parishes, and that is twenty-eight 16  “Rei Jaume de bona memòria, lo senyor Rey en Johan de bona memòria, la molt alta senyora infanta dona Johana de bona memòria, el muy noble Rey don Enrique de buena memoria”; and “del senyor Rey en Pere de bona memòria pare nostre; als nostres antecessors de loable memoria.” From Tortosa, Arxiu Comarcal del Baix Ebre, Batllia II, 42, fol. 4r; Girona, Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Girona, XV.4, llibre 3, unnumbered; Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancelleria, reg. 2029, fol. 172v; Cancelleria, Papeles por incorporar, Cervera–2, fol. 1v; Cancelleria Varia, 28, fol. 33r; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, esp. 216, fol. 89r.

17  “Sicut logicus adquirit habitum logicae per scientiam, ita dominus Iesus Christus homo habet in memoria omnia in hoc, quod deitas, sub habitu memoriae creatae, recolere uult omnia, quae recolit, in quantum est homo et in quantum etiam est Deus; et sic attingit et comprehendit dominus Iesus Christus omnes creaturas, et quantum est Deus et in quantum est creatura.” Cited from Raimundus Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, ed. Pere Villalba, 3 vols. (Turnhout, 2000), 2:591.

18  “Omnium habere memoriam et in nullo penitus errare potius pertinent divinitatis quam humanitati nimirum est.” Cited from Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancelleria, 1913, fol. 184r. 19  Barcelona, Arxiu de la Ciutat de Barcelona, Consell de Cent, B-VI, llibre 2, fol. 3v.

20  Irene Bueno, “‘Dixit quod non recordatur’: Memory as Proof in Inquisitorial Trials (Early Fourteenth-Century France),” in The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Lucie Doležalová (Leiden, 2010), 365–93.



Memory in the Middle Ages

5

years and more,” while another stated “from his memory until now, which is twenty years, he has seen the executors of Girona acting in the said parishes.”21 The record can go further back still if it concatenated the memory of various people. However, a reliable memory in these records went no further back than a hundred years. Reliance on the powers of human recall shows the disadvantages and limits in numerous legal disputes. Thus, in some jurisdictional disputes in the Pyrenees between the abbot of Sant Joan de les Abadesses and the king, the latter explained: It is true that the vicars and other officers from La Ral, in reality without any right and contravening ancient privileges and uses, usurped and seized all the jurisdiction that the abbot and the monastery have over their men in the vicariate of La Ral, which they had possessed for ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, and seventy years and for so long in the past that there is no human memory to contradict it.22

This is not much different from what was said in 1395, also in Catalonia, in a legal dispute between the monastery of Poblet and the town of Valls over dominion of a farm, thus showing that it was really a formula with which to express the sequence of years going back beyond the record: The aforesaid abbot and monastery said that they had and possessed and have had and possessed said farm of Doldellops in full possession with all its lands and assets for ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years and so long that there is no human memory to contradict it.23

In 1384, in Igualada, another Catalan town, the local rulers explained to the king that the clash between bands in the town was remembered to have lasted a hundred years: In a humble explanation made to us an eminent citizen from the town of Igualada about the factions he said that for almost one hundred years and particularly for two and a half years between on one side the so-called Castellolins and, on the other side, the Ocellons had been fighting in this town and the surrounding area by instigation of the enemy of humanity.24

21  “De sa memòria a ansà ha vist usar la Cort del Rey en les dites perròchies e ha XXVIII ayns e més”; and “de sa memòria a ansà qui es XX anys ha vists los saygs de Gerona usar axí� matex en els dites perròchies.” From Girona, Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Girona, I.1.2.1, lligall 3, llibre 2, fols. 15v and 16r.

22  “É� s cert que los vaguers e altres oficials de Sarreyal da ffet sens tota conaxensa usurparan e levaran contra los dits privilegis e usos antichs tota la jurisdicció que lo abbat e lo manastir havian en llur homens dins la vagaria de Sarreyal constituits la qual havia possaï�da per x, xx, xxx, xxxx, l, lx e lxx. anys passats e per tant de temps més avant que no era memòria d.òmens en contrari.” From Sant Joan de les Abadesses, Arxiu del Monestir de Sant Joan de les Abadesses, Documents sobre la jurisdicció de l’abat e la veguerí�a de la Ral, fol. 2r. 23  “Lo dit abat e convent deyen que ells tenien e posseï�en e an tenguda e posseyda la dita granya de Dol de Lops en x, xx, xxx, xl, l, lx anys, e de tant de temps ençà que memòria de homens no és en contrari, per fi e franch alou ab tot sos terme e pertinençes.” Cited from Jordi Rius i Jové, “Transcripció i notes d’un plet pel domini de la Granja de Doldellops (1395),” Quaderns de Vilaniu 21 (1992): 29.

24  “[E]xposicione humili nobis facta pro parte proborum hominem ville Aqualate quod est super bandositatibus que quasi a centum annis et potissime a duobus annis et medio citer intra los Castells Aulins ex una parte e los Ocellons ex parte altera, in dicta villa et eius convicino instigate

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One can also talk about social or collective memory, derived from interlinking these popular accounts, a memory that combines, completes, and eventually weaves a picture of everyday life beyond the individual experience.25 But this level of antiquity already surpasses the human record. So, across a wide range of disputes, documentation shows that supposed rights of ownership or any other kind, are so deeply rooted that they extend beyond the memory of contemporaries; it is no longer memory: Time that is no longer in the memory of men. Across such a large space of time that human memory is against [it]. No human memory contradicts [it].26

An ancient memory positively supports inherent rights. In 1425, King Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon backed a decision that was questioned because there could be no opposing precedents dating that far back: “it is so long ago that there is no contradictory memory.”27 Of course, one of the strategies for increasing patrimony was to occupy unpopulated lands, farm them, and finally obtain a title deed from the sovereign based on the lack of memory about other landholders: “so long ago that human memory does not contradict it,” as practised successfully in Castile at the end of the Middle Ages.28 However, with no other basis than memories fading over time, disputes would frequently arise; memory required documented reinforcement. Very often, orders and legislation were collected in documentary form as a way to combat memory’s weakness. In 1196, King Peter the Catholic of Aragon began his disposition indicating: “given that human memory is feeble, we all need to adopt the consensus of the testimony inherent in what is written.”29 Numerous documentary collections aimed to become the memory on which to base appropriate cases. For example, Sant Joan de les Abadesses made this case in the fifteenth century in his dispute with the king for jurisdiction over La Ral: inimico humani generis viguentur.” Cited from Joan Cruz, Els Privilegis de la vila d’Igualada (Barcelona, 1990), 308.

25  Isabel Alfonso, “Memoria e identidad en las pesquisas judiciales en el area castellano-leonesa medi­eval,” in Construir la identidad en la Edad Media: poder y memoria en la Castilla de los siglos vii a xv, ed. José Antonio Jara, Georges Martin and Isabel Alfonso (Cuenca, 2010), 270–72.

26  “Temps que no és memòria d’òmnes”; “usu antiquissimo etiam usitato in tantum quod memoria hominum in contrarium non extabat”; “tan gran espay de temps que memòria d’òmes no n’és en contra”; “atento tempore citra quod hominum memoria in contrarium non existit”; “memòria d’homes non és contrari.” From Tortosa, Arxiu Comarcal del Baix Ebre, Paheria i Vegueria I, procés 8, unnumbered; procés 48, unnumbered; Comú IV, 113; Vic, Arxiu Històric Municipal, llibre III, 57; Girona, Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Girona, I.1.2.1, lligall 3, fol. 58r; Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancelleria, 2217, fol. 108v, among many others.

27  “A tanto tempore cirta de cuius memoria in contrarium non existit.” From Tortosa, Arxiu Comarcal del Baix Ebre, Paheria e Vegueria I, 56, fol. 1r. 28  “Tanto que memoria de omne non es en contrario.” Cited from José Antonio Jara Fuente, “‘Que memoria de onbre non es en contrario’. Usurpación de tierras y manipulación del pasado en la Castilla urbana del siglo xv,” Studia historica. Historia Medi­eval 20–21 (2002–2003): 73–104.

29  “Cum hominem memoria sit labilis, que inter aliquos geruntur fidei scripture comitti conssentio.” Cited from Martin Alvira, Pedro el Católico, Rey de Aragón y Conde de Barcelona (1196–1213). Documentos, Testimonios y Memoria Històrica, 6 vols. (Zaragoza, 2010), 1:198.



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Memory must be made in the way in which the agreements were made that established the jurisdictions of the town and the vicariate of La Ral between, on the one hand, the lord King James, of good memory, and the other kings who later succeed him and, on the other hand, the abbot of Sant Joan de les Abadesses.30

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, collections of breaches and abuses by lords31 were kept as they accumulated. Frequently, a document heading read, “This is the memory.”32 The memory could be good or bad, because it might keep a record of the rights possessed or, conversely, the offences suffered. So, when an agreement was reached in 1203 between the bishop of Lleida and the countess of Urgell, it stated the importance of a solid memory: “Finally it shall still be possessed throughout life with good memory and in its full sense.”33 Many legal judgements, especially those solving long conflicts, mention the desire to remain permanently in the memory: “in the memory of future [times]” in the words of the sentence of 1311 between the abbot of Ager and the bishop of Urgell.34 Writing down agreements, orders, and dispositions became essential for sustaining memory. In 1244, King James I of Aragon ordered his vicar and eminent citizens (prohoms) of Barcelona to always keep in mind a constitutional law about the kidnapping of maidens and secret weddings and to note these “in the book of your customs or uses, for the perpetual memory of matters.”35 With similar words, in 1297 the king’s grandson, James II, ordered his vicar in Manresa to record his orders, saying: “you must keep a copy of the present letter in the book of your court to have a perpetual memory of matters.” He once again invoked memory when ordering the same officer to count the assets to be registered, and thus retain the existing rights permanently in the memory.36 All governments and administrations specified the things “that are kept in memory,” as a way to permanently record agreements and provisions and manage all kinds of topics and conflicts.37 Municipal ordinances were put down in writing to invoke this neces30  “Memòria sia en qual manera los contractes qui foren fets entre lo senyor Rey en Jachme de bona memòria e los altres Reys qui après son stats de una part e l’onrat Abbat de Sent Johan Cesabadessas de l’altra part sobre les juradiccions de la vila e vagaria de Sarrayal.” From Sant Joan de les Abadesses, Arxiu del Monestir de Sant Joan de les Abadesses, Documents sobrela jurisdicció de l’abat e la veguerí�a de la Ral, fol. 1r. 31  Flocel Sabaté, La feudalización de la sociedad catalana (Granada, 2007), 70–71.

32  “Hec est memoria.” From Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, Arxiu, fons de pergamins R1910, parchment 384; Luis Rubio, Documentos lingüísticos catalanes de los siglos X–XII (Murcia, 1979), 72; Philip D. Rasico, “El català preliterari en uns documents de l’antic bisbat d’Urgell (segles XI–XII),” Urgellia 7 (1984–85): 286. 33  “Finaliter possidere vivens ad huc in bona memoria et pleno sensu.” From Lleida, Arxiu Capitular de Lleida, drawer 119, packet 2, parchment 19.

34  “Ad memoria futurorum.” From Lleida, Arxiu Capitular de Lleida, fons À� ger, packet 2, parchment 53. 35  “In libro vestrarum consuetudinum sive usaticorum ad perpetuam rei memoriam.” Cited from Joaquim Miret i Sans, Itinerari de Jaume I “el conqueridor” (Barcelona, 1918), 169.

36  “[F]acientes ad perpetua rei memoria presentem literam in libro vestre curie registrari.” From Manresa, Arxiu Comarcal del Bages, fons del veguer 4, unnumbered. 37  “Que haien mes a memòria.” From Barcelona, Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona C–XV, llibre 3, fol. 78r.

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sity, while at the same time insisting on the equivalence between a written register and memory. This was stated in Valencia in 1310, Recognizing the forgetfulness of men who, through levity and the weakness of nature, can err and not have a memory of things, so the juries and prohom councillors ordered that the aforesaid ordinations and chapters be put in written memory, to which anyone can easily resort.38

Almost as many contemporary examples can be found as there were towns and cities. In the Catalan town of Balaguer, for instance, in 1354, the municipal authorities, “put it in writing so that from here onwards the aforesaid ordinances shall remain in the firm and lasting memory.”39 As a result, expressions about posar a la memòria (“putting it into the memory”) entered into everyday political affairs. For example, before the representatives of the city of Lleida set out for a general Cort assembly in Perpignan, in 1351, the local government ordered “that all the concessions that can be good and profitable for the city be expressed in writing as a chapter and memory, so that the representatives who go to the Parliament gathering in Perpignan can obtain them for the city.”40 The introduction of documentary records in both administrative and official practice and in business and economic agreements was linked to improved methods of registering and better management. It followed the introduction of notarial systems, the organization of public documentation on a Roman legal basis,41 and material improvements, like the spread of paper from the thirteenth century onwards.42 However, this was still always done under the invocation of memory, with the document meant to assist the memory. Notaries and scribes tended to organize their writings well and produce compilations and summaries explicitly known as memorials. As a notary from Lleida explained before the end of the thirteenth century: “written from memory in the memorial book of Domènec de Siscar, public notary of said city.”43 Memory played a vital role even in a new scenario dominated by the spread of writing, based on a wide social con38  “Com per oblidança d’òmens, los quals leugerament segons frèvol natura pot hom errar e no aver memòria de les coses, per ço manaren los dits jurats e prohomens consellers que·ls dits ordenaments e capí�tols sien meses en memòria de scriptura, a la qual cascú leugerament pot recórrer.” Cited from Antoni Furió and Ferran Garcia-Oliver, Llibre d’establiments i ordenacions de la ciutat de València (Valencia, 2007), 23.

39  “Feren transladar e escriure, per ço que d’aquí� a avant estiguessin los dits bans e ordinacions en pus ferma duradora memòria.” Cited from Robert Cuellas, El ‘Llibre de Costums, Privilegis i Ordinacions’ de la ciutat de Balaguer (Lleida, 2012), 149.

40  “Pensen que de totes gràcies que sien bones e profitoses a la ciutat sie feyt capí�tol e memòria als missatgers que van a les Corts a Perpinyà, per tal que aquels recapten e puxen aver aquels gràcies a la ciutat.” From Lleida, Arxiu Municipal de Lleida, llibre d’actes 399, fol 65r.

41  Ignasi J. Baiges, “El notariat català: origen i evolució,” in Actes del I Congrés d’història del notariat català (Barcelona, 1994), 134–37. 42  Thomas F. Glick, Tecno­logía, ciencia y cultura en la España medi­eval (Madrid, 1992), 59–61.

43  “A memoria scripta in libri memoriali Dominici de Siscario, notarii publici eiusdem civitatis.” From Lleida. Arxiu Capitular de Lleida, pergamins calaix 6, L–438.



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sensus of its continued importance; memory included representative testimonies and authorities involved with the events recorded in writing.44 In fact, since the Central Middle Ages, lists of domains and assets were justified formally by the need to retain them in the memory. Very explicitly, for example, before the end of the twelfth century, the Catalan canonry of Sant Pere of À� ger put in writing the “memory of the olive trees that Sant Pere has in Ager” or the “memory of the services in la Règula,” while declaring “that is the memory of the allodial lands of the monastery of Sant Llorenç.” Establishing the register of properties and rights was “to take into the memory,” to become “in accordance with the memory.”45 In this way memory became essential for all aspects of life; at the same time, however, human memory was inadequate and partial, since it could betray and confuse events. So, efforts were required to maintain a record of the past that went beyond the human mind’s power of retention, making it necessary to resort to writing in all fields, whether public or private, formal or even playful. This is explained at the head of a cookbook written by master Chiquart in the court of the Count of Savoy in 1420: Man’s unretentive memory often reduces clear things to doubt. The foresight of worthy ancients therefore determined that ephemeral things should be rendered immortal by being written down, so that whatever the feebleness of the human mind cannot retain might survive by means of immutable writings. In order, therefore, that people in the present as well as those of future generations may know with certainty, the following is written down.46

Memory does not necessarily refer to written documents; what matters is combatting oblivion, lack of knowledge, and ignorance. In Girona, in 1399, when an important agreement was reached about jurisdictional redemption, it was written down “so that all the things mentioned above be retained better in the memory and that nobody could allege or pretend to allege ignorance of this.”47 The local authorities would make a public proclamation of the agreement every year on the day of the fair, when large numbers 44  Yves Grava, “La mémoire, une base de l’organisation politique des communautés provençales au xive siècle,” in Temps, mémoire, tradition au Moyen Âge. Actes du XIIIe Congrés de la Société des Historians Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur Public (Aix-en-Provence, 4–5 juin 1982) (Aix-enProvence, 1983), 70–83.

45  “Memoria de holiuariis quo sanctus Petrus habet in Ager”; “memoria de seruiciis Regule”; “hec est memoria de suis alaudibus sancti Laurencii cenobi”; “deducere ad memoriam”; “ad memoriam.” Cited from Ramon Chesé, Col·lecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere d’Àger fins 1198, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 2013), 2:952–53, 1027, 645, 689.

46  “Lubrica gencium memoria frequenter que clara sunt reducit dubia propter que fides veterum provida decrevit rerum seriem scripture testimonio perhempnari ut ea que mentis humane fragilitas non recolit scripturis appareant auctenticis stabilita noscant igitur tam modernorum presencia quam futurorum posteritas hec infrascripta.” Cited from Terence Scully, “Du fait de cuisine” / “On Cookery” of Master Chiquart (1420) (Tempe, 2010), 87. 47  “Per tal que totes les coses dessús dites mills sien en memòria retingudes e algun en açò no pusque ignorància pretendre o allegar.” From Girona, Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Girona XV. 4, llibre 1, fol. 8v.

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of people were in the city. The struggle to retain memory, in this case, then, involved repeating once a year in public what they did not want to forget. Elsewhere other techniques were used: stones used to mark out property boundaries,48 especially when these were new lands,49 intended as a permanent memory. Properties seized from Muslims in Valencia in the thirteenth century were defined “by placing milestones and markers for the eternal memory of these limits.”50 However, the spread of literacy across different aspects of communication in the Late Middle Ages, especially where knowledge was concerned, focused memory on its written record, which was increasingly valued, while at the same time provoking distrust in orality or any pretension of memory not registered in writing.51 Nobody doubted that the mind’s fragility made the retention of knowledge vulnerable. In 1334, when Opicinus de Canistris fell ill and lost consciousness, as he himself explained afterwards, he could not talk and lost a large part of his “literal memory,” by which he meant the record of acquired knowledge.52 Although the path of life culminated in the afterlife, according to the prevailing religious paradigm, at the personal level, what remained after death of a human being was conserved in someone’s memory. This is how the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique expressed it on the death of his father: He returned his soul to he whom he had given him it (which heaven gave him in its glory), and still he lost his life he left us a great comfort his memory.53

In general, the constant invocation of memory across different aspects of everyday life reflected not only a growing concern to support it by more written documents, but also an interest in better understanding such an important human function.

48  Angels Casanova, “La utilització de pedres i elements gravats com a fites i indicadors de lí�mits territorials. Aportacions documentals,” Gala. Revista d’Arqueo­logia i Antropo­logia 1 (1992): 143–52. 49  Flocel Sabaté, “Occuper la frontière du nord-est péninsulaire (xe–xiie siècles),” in Entre Islam et Chrétienté. La territorialisation des frontières xie–xvie siècle, ed. Stéphane Boissellier and Isabel Cristina Ferreira Fernandes (Rennes, 2015), 83–113 at 89–91.

50  “Ponendo inibi, ad eternam rei memoriam, fitas seu mollones.” Cited from Manuel Pastor, “Les senyories valencianes dels comtes d’Urgell. Les baronies de Bunyol, Xiva i Xestalgar entre el 1238 i el 1327. Renda i jurisdicció,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of València, 2014), 1:737. 51  Camen Marimón, “‘La memoria de omne deleznadera es’: oralidad, textualidad y medios de transmisión la Edad Media,” in Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filo­logía Hispánica 24 (2006): 139–57.

52  “Memoria litteralis.” Cited from André Vernet, “Les ‘visions’ cosmiques d’Opicinus de Canistris,” in Fin du monde et signes des temps. Visionnaires et prophètes en France méridionale (fin xiiie–début xve siècle), ed. André Vauchez (Toulouse, 1992), 295–307 at 299.

53  “Dio el alma a quien se la dio / (el cual la dio en el cielo / en su gloria), / que aunque la vida perdió / dejónos harto consuelo / su memoria.” Cited from Jorge Manrique, Poesía (Madrid, 1975), 148.



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Memory Defined: What and Where It Is

“The predominant opinion in our youth, my brother Quintus, if you remember […].”54 So began Cicero in his second book of the De oratore, evoking his memory of infancy. Memory occupied a central place in Roman oratory, both in a civic and moral sense.55 As a record of the past, it was joined with intelligence, attentive to the present, but with an eye on the future. Memory, intelligence and foresight are the elements that constitute prudence, which dictates to us what is good and what is bad, as Cicero himself defines: Prudence is the knowledge of things which are good, or bad, or neither good nor bad. Its parts are memory, intelligence, and foresight. Memory is that faculty by which the mind recovers the knowledge of things which have been. Intelligence is that by which it perceives what exists at present. Foresight is that by which anything is seen to be about to happen, before it does happen.56

This tripartite approach, linking memory, intelligence, and providence, was easily adaptable to a Christian outlook. Augustine of Hippo incorporated the reflection on memory in his thought. He presented a tri-functionality of memory, intelligence, and will, all complementing each other as a single mind, a single life, and a single substance: Since, then, these three, memory, understanding, will, are not three lives, but one life; nor three minds, but one mind; it follows certainly that neither are they three substances, but one substance. Since memory, which is called life, and mind, and substance, is so called in respect to itself; but it is called memory, relatively to something.57

St. Augustine places memory within the soul, although separated from the four perturbations of the soul (“desire, happiness, fear, and sadness”).58 He interprets it as having a vital connective function, storing images of everything we have known and sensed, excepting only what has been absorbed by its true enemy, oblivion: 54  “Magna nobis pueris, Quinte frater, si memoria tenes. opinio […].” Cited from Marcus Tullius Cicero, De oratore. Libro secondo (Rome, 1985), 5. 55  Renato Barilli, Rhetoric (Minneapolis, 1983), 24–26.

56  “Prudentia est rerum bonarum et malarum neutrarumque scientia. Partes eius: memoria, intelligentia, providentia. Memoria est, per quam animus repetit illa, quae fuerunt; intellegentia, per quam ea perspicit, quae sunt; providentia, per quam futurum aliquid videtur ante quam factum est.” Cited from Marcus Tullius Cicero, “De inventione. Liber secundus,” in The Latin Library, accessed November 1, 2019, http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/inventione2.shtml. Translation by C. D. Yonge at http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793C_web/deInventione/Bk2.pdf.

57  “Haec igitur tria, memoria, intellegentia, voluntas, quoniam non sunt tres vitae, sed una vita; nec tres mentes, sed una mens, consequenter utique nec tres substantiae sunt, sed una substantia. Memoria quippe, quod vita et mens et substantia dicitur, ad se ipsam dicitur; quod vero memoria dicitur, ad aliquid relative dicitur.” Cited from Aurelius Augustinus, “De trinitate,” in Opera omnia, book 10, chap. 11.18, accessed November 1, 2019, http://www.augustinus.it/latino/trinita/ index2.htm. Translation from http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130110.htm. 58  “Perturbationes animi: cupiditatem, laetitiam, metum, tristitiam.” Cited from Aurelius Augus­ tinus, “Confessionum libri,” in Opera omnia, book 10, chap. 14.22, accessed November 1, 2019, http://www.augustinus.it/latino/confessioni/index2.htm.

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And I enter the fields and roomy chambers of memory, where are the treasures of countless images, imported into it from all manner of things by the senses. There is treasured up whatsoever likewise we think, either by enlarging or diminishing, or by varying in any way whatever those things which the sense has arrived at; yea, and whatever else has been entrusted to it and stored up, which oblivion has not yet engulfed and buried.59

The record of sensations, of the good and the bad, and, especially, the notion of what we know, what we are, and what we believe, as well as the remembrance that we have forgotten things, is all in the memory, although stored in an untidy way and under various and sometimes complex references. Thus, memory is the most important of all things, the keystone that supports all the references and the identity: These things do I within, in that vast chamber of my memory. For there are near me heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I can think upon in them, besides those which I have forgotten. There also do I meet with myself, and recall myself—what, when, or where I did a thing, and how I was affected when I did it. There are all which I remember, either by personal experience or on the faith of others. Out of the same supply do I myself with the past construct now this, now that likeness of things, which either I have experienced, or, from having experienced, have believed; and thence again future actions, events, and hopes, and upon all these again do I meditate as if they were present.60

Defining the memory as one of the parts of the mind implies that it must have a specific physical space. The location and working of this element of the human body was studied by Costa ben Luca (Constabulus), an author writing between the ninth and tenth centuries who was widely repeated in later centuries when his texts were confused with those by Aristotle. He imagined the memory as a corpuscle—“like a worm” (similis vermin)— deposited in a specific hole in the head, which had to be physically stimulated to find the memories through the movement of one’s head or eyes: That happens to whoever wishes to recall something, that moving the head vigorously and inclining it, while keeping the eyes looking up, facilitates that, in this position or figure the corpuscule similar to a worm can come out through this mentioned type of hole in the head and go upwards.61

59  “Venio in campos et lata praetoria memoriae, ubi sunt thesauri innumerabilium imaginum de cuiuscemodi rebus sensis invectarum. Ibi reconditum est, quidquid etiam cogitamus, vel augendo vel minuendo vel utcumque variando ea quae sensus attigerit, et si quid aliud commendatum et repositum est, quod nondum absorbuit et sepelivit oblivio.” Cited from Aurelius Augustinus, “Confessionum libri,” book 10, chap. 8.12, accessed November 1, 2019, http://www.augustinus.it/ latino/confessioni/index2.htm. Translation from http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110110.htm.

60  “Intus haec ago, in aula ingenti memoriae meae. Ibi enim mihi caelum et terra et mare praesto sunt cum omnibus, quae in eis sentire potui, praeter illa, quae oblitus sum. Ibi mihi et ipse occurro meque recolo, quid, quando et ubi egerim quoque modo, cum agerem, affectus fuerim. Ibi sunt omnia, quae sive experta a me sive credita memini. Ex eadem copia etiam similitudines rerum vel expertarum vel ex eis, quas expertus sum, creditarum alias atque alias et ipse contexo praeteritis atque ex his etiam futuras actiones et eventa et spes, et haec omnia rursus quasi praesentia meditor.” Cited from Aurelius Augustinus, “Confessionum libri,” book 10, chap. 8.12, accessed November 1, 2019, http://www.augustinus.it/latino/confessioni/index2.htm. Translation from http://www. newadvent.org/fathers/110110.htm.

61  “Ideo accidit, ei qui uult recordari alicuius rei, ut caput suum ualde mergat et inclinando eum retrouertat et immotis oculis sursum aspiciat, ut haec positio uel figura fiat ei auxiliatrix ad



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Constabulus also mentions the pithacium as support for recall and memory.62 In a very generalized way, different authors situated the hole or space that the human body reserves for the memory in the occiput, or rear of the head, as Ramon Llull defined it in the thirteenth century: “It is in the back, in the occiput of men, because it is an instrument with which to remember.”63 At around the same time, Gilbert de Tournai followed his contemporaries but provided greater detail on this: The sensitive memory is an energy situated in a cell behind the brain, established for the conservation of the impressions from the attention placed on the sensitive things, that the estimative faculty, that lacks organ and time, has perceived for each of the senses.64

Indeed, memory was considered throughout the Middle Ages as one of the three powers of the human being, equivalent to the trinitary model for God: “In heaven God is three people: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and in the head are three powers: intelligence, reason, and memory.”65 This is the tri-functional hypothesis broadly understood and accepted. Ramon Llull explains the purpose of each: “Our Lady has memory, intelligence, and will; for the memory she has the custom of remembering, and for intelligence thinking, and for the will, loving.”66 The prominent position of the memory explains its vital function while also conditioning reason, because the latter cannot function separately from the memory, according to Gilbert de Tournai: “Certainly in ourselves, memory cannot recall without reason, nor can reason without memory, [though] we can to some extent discern or judge.”67 These functions survive death,68 because when death arrives and separates the flesh from the soul, the three powers continue with renewed energy, as Dante explains: aperiendum foramen predictum et ut ipsum corpus uermile sursum possit eleuari.” Excerpta e libro Alfredi Anglici de motu cordis item Costa-ben-Lucae de diferentia animae et spiritus. Liber translatus a Johanne Hispalensi, ed. Carl Sigmund Barach (Innsbruck, 1878), 126.

62  José Martí�nez Gázquez, “El ‘De differentia inter spiritum et animam’ de Costa ben Luca en el ms. 80 del Archivo de la Catedral de Tortosa,” in Actas del ix Congreso Español de Estudios Clásicos, 7 vols. (Madrid, 1999), 7:220–21. 63  “Est retro in occipite hominis, quia est instrumentum ad memorandum.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:572.

64  “Memoria vero sensibilis est virtus sita in posteriori cellula cerebri, ordinata ad conservationem impressionum provenientium ex intentionibus in sensibilibus quas virtus aestimativa accepit ex singulis sensibus idigens organo et tempore.” Cited from Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi (Sobre el modo de aprender), ed. Javier Vergara and Virgilio Rodrí�guez (Madrid, 2014), 314. 65  “In celo Deus sunt tres persone, pater, filius, Sancte Spiritus et in capite tres potentie, intellectus, ratio et memoria.” From New Haven, Yale Uni­ver­sity Beinecke Library, MS 189, fol. 10v.

66  “Domina nostra habet memoriam, intellectum et uoluntatem; per memoriam habet in habitu recolere, et per intellectum intelligere, et per uoluntatem amare.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 2: 572.

67  “Nec certe in nobis memoria recordari potest sine ratione nec ratio sine memoria potest aliquatenus discernere sive iudicare.” Cited from Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi, 372.

68  Anna Cerbo, “Sull’arte: Ramón Llull e Dante,” Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli. Sezione Romanza, 41 (1999): 126.

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Whenever Lachesis has no more thread, It separates from the flesh, and virtually Bears with itself the human and divine;

The other faculties are voiceless all; The memory, the intelligence, and the will In action far more vigorous than before.69

It was a trilogy inherent in existence. Consequently, as Llull continues, in his duality as God and man, Jesus Christ can also be explained in the same way: “as the divine will and human will are reflected in love, and the divine and human intellect are reflected in thought, and the eternity of God and the memory of our lord Jesus Christ are reflected in remembering.”70 In the fourteenth century, when Opicinus de Canistris depicted the human being within a comprehensive worldview, below divinity and above the world, he characterized humans with five concepts in descending order: “reason, memory, intelligence, will, sentiment.”71 Memory is indissolubly linked to the human body and participates in a cosmic order. The conquest of historical time by the Church provided a continuous narrative from Creation to the Second Coming of Christ (parousia) in which the human being was central. In the context of salvation, and the dogmas of faith required to achieve salvation, memory had a role in human fate; so as not to fall from the path of righteousness, one has to remember one’s Christian duties. Christian life was one of constant remembering. Many medi­eval authors pointed this out, including Henry Suso in the fourteenth century: “Jesus is mentioned and Mary is remembered.”72 Religious faith consists of recalling, not only for humans but, to enjoy the divine vision, it was also important for angels to ensure their memory was not affected by forgetfulness, as Gilbert de Tournai remarked in the thirteenth century: The created memory, which is part of his image, is an intellectual power in the angels, not co-eternal with the eternal, but rather part of his eternity, mutable by nature but that exceeds by contemplation and beatitude all mutability of time and without any lapse since it was made; God being inherent to it, it overcomes all the variable changes of times.73

69  “Quando Làchesis non ha piú del lino, / solvesi da la carne, e in virtute / ne porta seco e l’umano e’l divino: / l’altre potenze tutte quante mute; / memoria, intelligenza e volontade / in atto molto più che prima agute.” Cited from Dante, “Divina Commedia,” in Tutte le opere (Rome, 2005), 382 (Purgatorio, XXV.79–84). Longfellow translation from https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/ divine-comedy/purgatorio/purgatorio-25/, accessed November 1, 2019.

70  “Sicut voluntas diuina et uoluntas humana quae se respiciunt in amare et intellectus diuinus et humanus qui se respiciunt in intelligere et aeternitas Dei et memoria domini nostril Iesu Christi, quae se respiciunt in recolere.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientie, 2: 586–87. 71  “Ratio, memoria, intellectus, voluntas, sensus.” From Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1993 (the image was included in the exhibition “Pen and Parchment. Drawing in the Middle Ages,” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, but unfortunately was not included in the catalogue). 72  “Yhesu nominatur et Maria memoratur.” From New Haven, Yale Uni­ver­sity Beinecke Library, MS 130, fol. 3r.

73  “Memoria autem creata quae est pars imaginis est in angelis vis intellectualis non coaeterna



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Boncompagno da Signa, very influential in the early thirteenth century, situated memory between heaven and hell while he reused the classical image linking the memory of the past with the demands of the present and the hopes of the future.74 Memory was a glorious and wonderful gift of nature, by which we recall the past, comprehend the present, and contemplate the future through its similarities with the past.75 Boncompagno also noted that memory was not only necessary for rhetoric but also in the arts and professions,76 as he explained in his Rethorica novissima, a work with great impact in university circles in Bo­logna and other intellectual centres.77 In fact, while early medi­eval authors like Alcuin continued dealing with memory within rhetoric, citing Cicero,78 the thirteenth-century scholastics, like the emblematic Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, moved it towards ethics, granting it a much wider significance. Certainly, the introduction of Aristotelian thought facilitated the abandoning of Platonic memory as an instrument that facilitates knowledge through memory and, instead, developed a more empirical approach closely linked to the sensations. The reconstruction and re-elaboration of the past was thus interpreted as arising from the association of ideas supplied by sensory experience, which facilitated the perception of various types of memory: the sensory, which, in a general sense, can be perceived as common to humans and animals; the imaginative, which extracted the formal image from the sensations, and is also perceived in humans and animals; and the rational, that allowed forms and images disconnected from the sensations to be elaborated, which, thanks to the memory, provided the raw material for the understanding to generate ideas or universal concepts.79 From a physio­logical point of view, these complex requirements occupy all the brain, according to Gilbert de Tournai: “It is necessary that the aeterno sed aeternitatis particeps, natura mutabilis sed contemplatione et beatitudine omnem excedents mutabilitatem temporis et sine ullo lapsu ex quo fact est inhaerendo Deo excedit omnem volubilem vicissitudinem temporum.” Cited from Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi, 312–14.

74  Pietro De Leone, “Storia e memoria,” in I saperi nella scuola del futuro, ed. Armando Vitale (Soveria Mannelli, 2002), 147.

75  Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Medi­eval Craft of Memory: An Antho­logy of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, 2002), 105. 76  Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 2007), 17–69.

77  Luca Marcozzi, “La ‘rhetorica novissima’ de Boncompagno da Signa e l’interpretazione di quattro passi della ‘Commedia’,” Rivista di studi danteschi 9 (2009): 370–75.

78  “CHARLES: What are you to say about memory, which I deem to be the noblest part of rhetoric? ALBINUS: What can I tell you except what Cicero has already said: Memory is a treasure trove of all things. If these are not used in all that we have thought or found, whether these are words or things, they have no use, and no matter how great they may be” (CAROLUS. Quod dicis de nobilissima, ut reor, rhetorica parte, memoria? ALBINUS. Quid aliud quam quod Marcus Tullius dicit, quod thesaurus est ómnium rerum memoria, quae nisi custos cogitatis inventisque rebus et verbis adhibeatur intelligimus omnia, etiamsi praeclara fuerint, in oratore peritura). Cited from Alcuin (al. Flaccus Albinus), Dialogus de rhetorica et virtutibus, Patro­logiae cursus completus. Series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1863), 101: col. 919. 79  Javier Vergara, “La memoria en las obras pedagógicas de la baja edad media,” Bordón 64, no. 4 (2012): 111–12.

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imagination is in the frontal part of the brain, then the thinking part is in the middle, and then that of recording and conserving in the back.”80 In any case, the process makes clear, as Gilbert emphasizes, that only through memory can one advance towards knowledge, and that is the radical difference between what is recalled by an irrational animal and what a human recalls: Remembering refers to what one knew before in the past, and that is common to all animals that have imagination; but to investigate using the memory or recollection is only for humans, because this involves voluntary inquiry of such an idea and makes it present after its absence.81

Ramon Llull interpreted memory as necessary and essential for the human condition, functioning as a bridge between the body and soul, a kind of third position: “memory is situated in the third number, because man is made up of soul and body, and this third number is in transit between one and the other, because it is neither soul nor body.”82 Without memory there would be no science: “thanks to remembering man has the habit of science, which is good, and privation of it is bad.”83 Moreover, “it is a matter of greatness to remember things of the past and the absent sensations.”84 Memory serves knowledge and will: “the memory has, for wisdom, the natural instinct to remember and it has, for the will, the natural appetite to remember.”85 Accordingly, memory can have positive or negative effects depending on the sensation derived from what is recalled: “if man recalls something disagreeable that another man has done to him, he will be filled with rage by natural instinct and by the appetite of the memory.”86 Conversely, “memory is of glory, in other words, of pleasure, just as nature has on feeling delight and pleasure.”87 Memory, either way, always has consequences: “quia memoria est de uirtute, facit opera uirtuosa.” Thus, it can be said that memory is the base for everything which is important; without it, nothing would be sustained, either in humans or animals:

80  “Necesse est ut imaginans sit in anteriori parte cerebri, deinde cogitans in medio, deinde memorans et conservants in posteriori.” Cited from Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi, 320.

81  “Unde memoria est eius quod prius sciebatur in praeterito, et hoc est commune omnibus animalibus habentibus imaginationem, sed investigare per memoriam aut rememorationem est in solis hominibus, quia hoc est voluntarie inquerire de huiusmodi intentione et facere eam praesentari post absentiam.” Cited from Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi, 316.

82  “Ipsa est posita in numero tertio, quoniam sicut homo est, ex anima et corpore, et in numerum tertium transit, in tantum quod non est anima neque corpum.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:201. 83  “Per quod recolere homo habet habitum scientiae, qui bonus est, et eius priuatio essent mala.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:201.

84  “Qui magnum quid est recolere res praeteritas et sensibus absentes.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:202. 85  “Habet per sapientiam instinctum naturalem ad recolendum, et habet per uolountatem appetitum naturalem ad recolendum.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:202. 86  “Si homo recolat aliquit displicitum quod aliquo homine recepit, quoniam tunc se mouet ad iram per instinctum naturalem et appetitum memoriae.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:202.

87  “Est de gloria, uidelicet de delectatione, idcirco naturam habet in habendo delectationem et placitum.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:203.



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The memory is for great and important things, in being a substantial part of the soul. Certainly, if it is accidental, it is not disposed to recall much nor possess a great capacity for remembering, and in contrast it is so disposed when it has to recall things with greater substance than just simpler accidental things. The same happens with kindness, and also with the will, virtue, truth, glory, duration, power, difference, concordance, the principal, the means, and the aim.88

Recollere (recall) is, in short, one of the three basic functions of human nature. Remembering who we are and where we are from is the only way to preserve identity (as shown by the oft-repeated example of the Knight of the Lion),89 to maintain oneself in the social group, and even to maintain one’s religious beliefs. Gilbert de Tournai clearly stated that life was not possible without memory, just as it wasn’t without food.90 In this sense, it can be said that the central position of memory does not lie so much in the capacity to store data as in the ability to recall it. Indeed, “the essential function of the memory is to remember or record.”91 Consequently, it is worth preserving and encouraging the power of the memory. Care must be taken to increase its functions, a concern that grew stronger during this period.

Memory Maintained and Promoted

The Retorica ad Herensium, a classical text that was influential throughout the Middle Ages when it was believed to have been written by Cicero, defined two types of memory: the natural and the artificial. The former referred to past events, while the latter was stimulated precisely to avoid forgetting the former. It was a crucial distinction, because the so-called artificial memory opened the door to all kinds of mnemonic devices: There are, then, two kinds of memory: one natural, and the other the product of art. The natural memory is that memory which is imbedded in our minds, born simultaneously with thought. The artificial memory is that memory which is strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline. But just as in everything else the merit of natural excellence often rivals acquired learning, and art, in its turn, reinforces and develops the natural advantages, so does it happen in this instance.92

88  “Memoria est de maioritate, ut sit pars substantialis animae, quia, si esset accidentalis, disposita non esset ad memorandum magna nec habere posset magnum recolere, cum ita sit, quod magnitudo maiorem habeat concordantiam cum substantia quam cum accidente; et bonitas similiter; et idem est de uoluntate, uirtute, gloria, duratione, potestate, differentia, concordantia, principio, medio et fine.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:204–05. 89  Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion, MS H, vv. 2822–34.

90  Javier Vergara, “El ‘De modo addiscendi’ (c. 1263) de Gilbert de Tournai O.F.M., un puente entre la tradición y el renacimiento,” Educación XXI 16, no. 2 (2013): 63–82, http://revistas.uned.es/ index.php/educacionXX1/article/view/10332. 91  “Essentialis autem operatiu memoriae memorari sive recordari.” Cited from Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi, 316.

92  “Sunt igitur duae memoriae: una naturalis, altera artificiosa. Naturalis est ea quae nostris animis insita est et simul cum cogitatione nata; artificiosa est ea quam confirmat inductio quaedam et ratio praeceptionis. Sed qua via in ceteris rebus ingenii bonitas imitatur saepe doctrinam, ars porro naturae commoda confirmat et auget, item fit in hac re ut nonnumquam naturalis memoria,

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The natural memory depends on the capacity of each person, although it can always be reinforced by discipline and exercises: The natural memory, if a person is endowed with an exceptional one, is often like this artificial memory, and this artificial memory, in its turn, retains and develops the natural advantages by a method of discipline. Thus the natural memory must be strengthened by discipline so as to become exceptional.93

The artificial memory reproduces evocative places and images (“backgrounds and images”),94 can be helped with writing and reading, and includes mnemonic exercises based on images and series of records. Equally, in the effort to increase rote retention, the setting and context must be taken into account to avoid distractions: “it will be more advantageous to obtain backgrounds in a deserted than in a populous region, because the crowding and passing to and fro of people confuse and weaken the impress of the images, while solitude keeps their outlines sharp.”95 In the seventh century, while defining the seven liberal arts, Martianus Capella included a specific chapter, De memoria, on rhetoric in which he reproduced the explanation about the two memories, insisting on the importance of rote exercise, the use of letters and images, and adding practical advice like silence at the moment of memorizing or adequate lighting to retain good images.96 Retaining and improving one’s memory became the main concern: in the Dialogus de rhetorica et virtutibus by Alcuin of York at the end of the eighth century, most of the short chapter dedicated to De memoria focused on how to increase one’s memory, based on a question asked supposedly by Charlemagne: Charles: Is there any formula or recipe that is used to increase one’s memory?

Alcuin: There is no other than recommending the exercise of the memory, of using the writing and practising studying. Drunkenness should be avoided, as it greatly harms all good study, because not only does it damage one’s health but also spoils the integrity of the mind.97

si cui data est egregia, similis sit huci artificiosae, porro haec artificiosa naturae commoda retineat et amplificat ratione doctrinae.” Cited from [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium. De ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), ed. Harry Caplan (London, 1964), 207–8. Translation here and below by Caplan and available at https://www.laits.utexas.edu/memoria/Ad_Herennium_Passages.html.

93  “Naturalis memoria praeceptione confirmanda est ut sit egregia, et haec quae doctrina datur indiget ingenii. Nec hoc magis aut monus in hac re quam in ceteris artibus fit, ut ingenio doctrina, praeceptione natura nitescat. Quare et illis qui natura memores sunt utilis haec erit institutio.” From [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium, 208. 94  “Constat igitur artificiosa memoria ex locis et imaginis.” From [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium, 208.

95  “Commodius est in derelicta quam in celebri regione locos comparare, propterea quod frequentia et obambulatio hominum conturbat et infirmat imaginum notas, solitudo conservat integras simulacrorum figures.” From [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium, 209–10. 96  Martiani Minei Felicis Capellae, De nuptiis Philo­logiae et Mercuri et de septem Artibus liberalibus. Libre novem (Frankfurt, 1836), 460–61.

97  “Car. Suntne alique ejus praecepta, quomodo vel illa adhibenda vel augenda sit? – Alb. Non habemus ejus alia praecepta, nici dicendi exercitationem et scribendi usum, et cogitandi studium; et ebrietatem cavendam, quae omnibus bonis studiis nocet maxime; quae non solum corporis



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Alcuin’s response is based on the practice following the classical model of exercise, writing and study. The addition of drunkenness became one of the reiterated references throughout the Middle Ages. Given the importance of remembering, one of the main criticisms of drunkenness was usually that it erased the memory.98 Elsewhere, drunkenness is condemned because it affects three areas of knowledge: “drunkenness erases memory, dissipates the senses, confuses the intellect.”99 Between the third and seventeenth centuries the Gallenic medical model gained widespread acceptance in the West, duly reinforced by Muslim thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes who adapted Aristotle’s natural philosophy,100 particularly the notion of the four humours and their associated qualities and temperaments, elements, and organs.101 This model saw memory as part of the body. One could deduce, as Albertus Magnus did, that those who have a better power to remember have a melancholic nature, because their dry and cold condition facilitates them retaining the impression of images more clearly. That would explain, for Gilbert de Tournai, why people with the worst memories are “small children, the elderly, and quick-witted adults” (infantes et senes et nimis veloces ingenii): in all of them, excessive humidity dominates. In any case, the humours and qualities must be kept in a necessary balance, because the other group of humans with poor memory are those who take a long time to understand things (nimis tardi); they are too dry, which is why images have difficulty remaining fixed with them.102. Knowing that humidity and coldness harm memory, one can strengthen it by avoiding food and circumstances associated with cold and wet. By the thirteenth century advice and explicit aphorisms—Amphorismi (or Canones) memoria (or for the conservatione memoria)—taken from Arabized Gallenism now spread into Latin, through authors like Arnau de Vilanova, to maintain or improve the memory, even to strengthen and restore memory (confortant memoriam et restaurant). Such guidance began with a set of general advice: always try to avoid excessive cold and strong heat; do moderate exercise before every meal and remain standing or stroll gently after having eaten; moderate the consumption of food and drinks of a cold or humid complexion, like raw fruit and vegetables, avoid strong meats and opt for tender ones, especially chicken or partridge and, even more, the brains of these fowl; balance waking and sleeping, without excess in either, and avoid siestas; evacuate all the superfluities adequately from all the conduits (“through the intestines, through the urine, through the holes in the nose, through the palate, through the mouth, through the ears, through friction of the head aufert sanitatem, sed etiam mentis adimigt integritatem.” Cited from Alcuin (al. Flaccus Albinus), Dialogus de rhetorica et virtutibus, 101: col. 919 98  New Haven, Yale Uni­ver­sity Beinecke Library, Marston MS 140, fol. 268v–69r.

99  “Ebrietas aufert memoriam, dissipat sensum, confundit intellectum.” From New Haven, Yale Uni­ver­sity Beinecke Library, S 482.113, fol. 1r.

100  Luis Garcí�a Ballester, La búsqueda de la salud. Sanadores y enfermos en la España medi­eval (Barcelona, 2001), 129–32. 101  Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexualidad y saber médico en la edad media (Barcelona, 1989), 45–47. 102  Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi, 324–26.

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with a comb” [per intestina, per urinam, per nares, per palatum, per os, per aures et per fricationem capitis cum pectine]), especially after sleep or exercise; maintain a good mood, with soft joy and honest delight. Other specific items similar to common advice for all health systems were added aimed especially at counteracting the fumositats; in other words, avoiding the damage from the rising of fumes produced during gastric digestion, according to how people then understood the digestive process. That implied avoiding food that generated gases, like pulses, cheeses, garlic, leeks or onions; not drinking cold water or wine while digesting; not going to sleep before digestion was complete; and helping close the mouth of the stomach to avoid fumes escaping with preparations of coriander or fruit with astringents. It was also worth avoiding fumes that rose from one’s feet, so they should be washed frequently with infusions of aromatic herbs and by sleeping barefoot or, at least, without shoes. Using the same logic, other measures were proposed that helped the memory: washing one’s hair every ten days (every four in other recipes) with a bleach in which medicinal plants had been macerated, or chewing mastic with ginger and other chewing gums prepared from musk, cashew, or coriander. Finally, memory was also increased by recalling everything one had seen and heard that one wanted to record: “taking care for what has been seen and heard by means of frequent recording corroborates and confirms the memory.”103 The fact that memory occupied the occipital part of the skull inspired efforts to improve the memory by stimulating this specific area. An adaptation of the abovementioned aphorisms by Arnau de Vilanova written in Catalan in the fifteenth century details this practice: Should you wish to do something to improve the memory, use a lotion that is called “pliris cum musto,” and another lotion called “from cashew,” and confections of cherry plum. With these products rub the memory, which is at the back of the head, with moonshine: they much improve the memory and restore it. The moonshine must be made from red wine, in which some sprigs of lemon balm, sage, and rosemary must have been placed. That must be put with a bandage made from linen cloth over the memory and it is a great secret.104

Other recipes seek the same objective: the De bonitate memorie, a late re-elaboration from the text by Arnau de Vilanova, added a confection of animal fat and honey, administered with an infusion of various plants.105 Beyond these formulae, during the thir103  “Sollicitudo visorum et auditorum frequens recordatio memoriam corroborat et confirmat.” Cited from Arnau de Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum series: Aphorismi particulares, aphorismi de memoria, aphorismi extravagantes, ed. Juan A. Paniagua and Pedro Gil-Sotres, Opera medica omnia Arnaldi de Villanova 6.2 (Barcelona, 1993), 205–20.

104  “En lo cas que vullau fer algun acte memoratiu, usau de una confecció qui·s apella ‘pliris cum musto,’ e altre confecció apellada anacardina, e mirabolans confits, e fregau la memòria derrera del cap ab ayguardent: conforten molt la memòria e la restauren. L’aygua ardent sia feta de vi vermell, en lo qual sia mès una manada de tarongina e de sàlvia e de romaní�, e puys sia posada ab una bena de drap de lli a la memòria, e és gran secret.” Cited from Arnau de Vilanova, Obres catalanes. II. Escrits mèdics, ed. Miquel Batllori (Barcelona, 1947), 255.

105  Juan Antonio Paniagua and Pedro Gil-Sostres, “Introducció,” in Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and Gil-Sotres, 214–15.



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teenth and fourteenth centuries, various authors repeated ancient advice regarding trying to find surroundings without distractions from too many people or too much light and notably, encouraging mnemonic techniques, as the Franciscan Gilbert de Tournai does extensively when he explains that “if one’s memory is bad it can be helped by technique and training it with the practice of rules. Four factors are necessary: time, activity, place, and method.”106 From here, he stresses that the right place for memorising must be found (better at night with silence) and, beginning with the invocation of classical authors, he discusses writing moderately, reading and meditating and, notably, linking the images one wished to remember to places and objects, as well as mentally fragmenting and distributing what one wishes to retain.107 Gilbert de Tournai’s recommendations on memory are framed by a concern to teach and retain knowledge, and this is why the work is entitled On Ways of Learning (De modo addiscendi). The link between memory and teaching was deeply rooted. Monastic teaching already influenced memorization: “they had to learn immediately by heart the 150 psalms of the psalter, an antho­logy from the Old and New Testaments, notably the life of Jesus.”108 Late-medi­eval grammar schools catering for burghers who wanted their sons to read and write also resorted to rote learning.109 Memorization, as an individual exercise by the student, was also indispensable in university teaching, especially if we consider the practical difficulties of accessing the texts and textbooks.110 It was expected that the holders of certain offices, such as jurists and lawyers, should retain concepts and key definitions in their memory. For some officials this was even an obligation: in 1330, the chapters of the Catalan maritime consulate in Bruges ordered: The consols need to remember the chapters so that they have a better memory and cannot claim ignorance, and they also promised to pay the stipulated fines for this in case they did it badly, in line with the oath taken.111

In a more generalized way, clergy were expected to retain a wide set of concepts and prayers. In fact, the concern with memorizing particularly applied to late-medi­eval 106  “Per artem nihilominus adiuvari et praeceptorum exercitatione formari; sunt ego quatuor necessaria: tempus, actus, locus, modus.” Cited from Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi, 352. 107  Gilbert de Tournai, De modo addiscendi, 352–70.

108  “Ils doivent ensuite apprendre par coeur les 150 psaumes du psautier, un florilège de textes de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament, notamment la vie de Jésus.” Cited from Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, L’école au moyen âge (Paris, 2007), 9. 109  Flocel Sabaté, “La formacio de la personalitat a l’edat mitjana,” in La formació de la personalitat a l’edat mitjana, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Lleida, 2016), 14–15.

110  Jacques Verger, “The Contribution of Medi­eval Universities to the Birth of Individualism and Individual Thought,” in The Individual in Political Theory and Practice, ed. Janet Coleman (Oxford, 1996), 59–77 at 65.

111  “Los consols los sien tenguts de recordar los capí�tols per tall que n’agen mills memòria e que no y puxen alleguar ignorància, e més prometen de pagar les penes qui posades hi són en cas que fallissien, sots virtut del sagrament.” Cited from Antonio Paz y Meliá, Series de los más importantes documentos del Archivo y Biblioteca del Exmo. Señor Duque de Medinaceli, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1915–22), 2:457.

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urban preachers. Contemporary conceptual,112 civic,113 and formal114 tendencies led at that period to the Church and the people finding a notable confluence in preaching, such that Francis Rapp proclaimed: “Perhaps never did so many men link their prestige to the seduction of the verb!”115 The preachers became true professionals of the word, which is why they took such great care of their discourses and the forms they used to present them.116 The search for efficacy justified theatricality, affecting urban location117 and all aspects of their delivery, given that the preacher had to master both gestures and diction, as well as having the speech well-prepared. In this context, in the fourteenth century, Francesc Eiximenis wrote a manual aimed at preachers with the explicit title of The Art of Preaching to the People (Art de predicació al poble) organized into three chapters: “the ultimate aim of preaching” (la causa final de la predicació), which was to instruct the people in the faith; “the efficient cause of preaching” (la causa eficient de la predicació), about the moral qualities of the preacher; and the form of preaching. The latter is the longest, structured into seven subchapters: “brevity of the sermon” (la brevetat del sermó), “speaking with fervour” (parlar amb fervor), “speaking slowly” (parlar pausadament), “preaching with devotion” (predicar amb devoció), “speaking morally” (parlar moralment), “preaching with prudence” (predicar amb prudència) and, finally, “orderly preaching” (predicar ordenadament). This orderliness occupied almost half the book, thus showing that to preach well, it was crucial to structure the sermon well. In this section, Eiximenis first recommends carefully choosing the theme and its elements and, then, focusing on an order that helps the memory, clearly understanding that one cannot be a good preacher without counting on mnemonic strategies. He recommended the use of analogies rather than just words: If what you want is to remember words, the memory has no easy task, because it has to create a similitude or a figure to remember a single word. In contrast, when we have to recall events, then a single similitude or figure can serve to remember a long story.118

112  Giacomo Todeschini, Richesse franciscaine. De la pauvreté volontaire à la société de marché (Lagrasse, 2008).

113  Daniela Romagnoli, “La courtoisie dans la ville: un modèle complexe,” in La ville et la cour. Des bonnes et des mauvaises manières, ed. Daniela Romagnoli (Paris, 1991), 25–87. 114  Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cam­bridge, 1996), 117–35.

115  “Jamais peut-être autant d’hommes ne durent leur prestige à la séduction du verbe!” In Francis Rapp, L’Église et la vie religieuse en Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1971), 130–36.

116  Jean-Arnault Dérens, “La prédication et la ville: pratiques de la parole et ‘religion civique’ à Montpellier aux xive et xve siècles,” in La prédication en Pays d’Oc (xiie–début xve siècle) (Toulouse, 1997), 47–352.

117  Prim Bertran, “El espacio religiosos en la ciudad catalana bajomedi­eval,” in Morpho­logie et identité sociale dans la ville medi­eval hispanique, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Christian Guilleré (Chambéry, 2012), 332–33.

118  “Si el que es pretén de recordar paraules la memòria no ho té gens fàcil, ja que ha de crear una similitud o una figura per recordar una sola paraula. En canvi, quan hem de recordar fets, aleshores una única similitud o figura ens pot servir per recordar una llarga història.” Cited from Francesc Eiximenis, Art de predicació al poble, ed. Xavier Renedo (Vic, 2009), 41.



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However, Eiximenis continued, “the memory suffers from real difficulty when it has to retain a large multitude of things” (la memòria ho té realment difí�cil quan ha de retenir una gran multitud de coses). That is why this teacher of preachers resorted to tricks from (pseudo)-Cicero—in the Retorica ad Herennium—and justified their contemporary use by making clear that other preachers were using it. The strategy is based on listing references: “Nowadays, this rule is used to remember names: if you have to remember a long list of words, arrange them placing the words along a long path with the help of an appropriate similitude.”119 This enables you to retain a list of the apostles in order by linking in the memory images that evoked each one. Similarly, places and numbers can be used, so that “if you are asked where such and such a name is placed, by remembering the place you put it, the number assigned to that place will come to mind,” which “eventually gives excellent results as, without a big effort, it is possible to retain many names and the numbers associated with them in the memory.”120 Eiximenis gave more examples of línies rectes (“straight lines”) where he added evocative references, like imagining a straight line between the firmament and earth, which places the stars, the sun, the moon, and the parts of the earth: “From the furthest heavens and descending in an orderly way for the intermediate spheres until the centre of the earth is reached”; a line between “cities, houses, and land”; and then one within “the human body beginning from the feet to the head and in reverse.”121 He then explains how you can do the same using a route, so you could imagine going from Rome to Santiago de Compostela all the while imagining putting references in each city according to its characteristics. Then he gives an example where you should imagine a great church: First, the most notable places and the chapels following their location; their headstones; their paintings; and the distance that separates each place from the others; and then with the support of similitudes and images, fit all you have into memorizing it.122

He summarizes various options, recommending you follow the easiest thread for retaining the information: Everyone can easily remember evocative events through words if one always keeps in mind that the things you wish to recall must be arranged in an order that expresses well the relation that there is between the images and the things that have to be memorized.

119  “Modernament es dóna aquesta regla per recordar noms; si has de recordar una llarga llista de paraules, ordena-la col·locant les paraules al llarg d’una extensa via amb l’ajuda d’una similitud escaient.” Cited from Eiximenis, Art de predicació, 42. 120  “Si se’t demana en quin lloc està posat tal nom, tot recordant el lloc on el vas col·locar, et vindrà a la memòria el número assignat a aquell lloc”; “a la llarga dóna uns resultats excel·lents, ja que sense gens d’esforç, és possible de retenir a la memòria molt de noms i els numeros que hi estan associats.” Cited from Eiximenis, Art de predicació, 43.

121  “Del cel empiri i es pot anar baixant ordenament per les esferes intermèdies fisn arribar al centre de la terra”; “ciutats, cases i finques”; “cos humà, començant pels peus fins al cap i a l’interès.” Cited from Eiximenis, Art de predicació, 44–47.

122  “Una gran església imaginant-te tot primer els llocs i les capelles més notables d’acord amb la seva situació, les seves làpides, les seves pintures i la distància que separa cada lloc dels altres, i després amb el suport de similituds i imatges, encabeix-hi tot el que hagis de memoritzar.” Cited from Eiximenis, Art de predicació, 46.

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You must know that we can find orders of this type in many things. Firstly, long and famous routes; secondly, a series of things arranged clearly and adequately; thirdly, enormous, luxurious, large houses; fourthly, through the disposition of parts of the human body; fifthly, taking one of your books where you had to study various subjects; sixthly, through a careful, well adjusted mix of the previous points; seventhly, through the conjunction of the syllables of certain words and terms; and, finally, when the end of one section of the discourse links with the start of the next and so on successively.123

Eiximenis also showed that books were used for reference and consulted repeatedly. He referred to the practice of his own predecessors and contemporaries who wrote on and marked up reference works: Memory can be strengthened by recording the order of subjects on which one had to preach in the book where the discourse has been prepared. The ancients used this method a lot, and nowadays there are also many people who use it, because in the books where they studied their sermons, or the subject they had to remember, they always put a straight line where the important sentence or passage that had to be recalled ended; and later they made another clearly visible mark in purple ink beside other important passages, so that these signs and these passages became firmly recorded in their memory and, thus, when they referred to them during the sermon, they talked as if they were reading from the book where they had put the signs that enabled them to recall it so clearly.124

The concern with mnemonics, in a context so marked by the need for teachers and especially preachers to remember specific things, soon culminated in a fifteenth-century genre called the Ars memorativa; in other words, works directly aimed at finding the best way to memorize and retain knowledge.125 Some scholars have seen this as a forerunner of the humanistic revival of the Renaissance.126 However, as Kim Rivers has pointed out, 123  “Tothom pot recordar fàcilment fets evocats a través de paraules si sempre té present que ha de saber ordenar les coses que vol recordar en un ordre que expressi bé la relació que hi ha d’haver entre les imatges i les coses que s’han de memoritzar. Cal saber que podem trobar fàcilment ordres d’aquesta mena en moltes coses. En primer lloc, en camins llargs i famosos; en segon lloc, en sèries de coses ordenades d’una manera clara i adequada; en tercer lloc, en cases enormes, luxoses i amples; en quart lloc, a través de la disposició dels membres del cos humà; en cinquè lloc, en un llibre teu on hagis d’estudiar diverses matèries; en sisè lloc, mitjançant una correcta i ben travada barreja dels punts anteriors; en setè lloc, a través de la conjunció de les sí�l·labes d’unes paraules i d’uns termes determinats; i, en últim lloc, quan el final d’una branca del discurs enllaça amb el principi de la següent i així� successivament.” Cited from Eiximenis, Art de predicació, 44.

124  “La memòria es pot potenciar tot recordant l’ordre de les matèries sobre les quals s’havia de predicar en el llibre on s’ha preparat el discurs. Els antics van fer servir molt aquest mètode, i avui també hi ha molta gent que l’usa, perquè en els llibres on estudiaven els seus sermons, o la matèria que haguessin de recordar, sempre posaven una lí�nea recta on s’acabava la sentència o el passatge important que calia recordar; i després feien una altra marca clarament visible de tinta de color porpra al marge d’altres passatges importants, de manera que aquells signes i aquells passatges quedaven fermament gravats e la seva memòria i, per tant, quan hi feien referència durant el sermó, en parlaven com si estiguessin llegint el llibre on havien posat els signes que els permetien de recordar amb tanta nitidesa.” Cited from Eiximenis, Art de predicació, 50. 125  Yates, The Art of Memory, 114–34.

126  Sabine Heimann-Seebach, Ars und scientia: Genese, Überlieferung und Funktionen der mnemo­



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this was no novelty, but rather a culmination of a practice developed by the mendicant friars, both Dominicans and Franciscans, since the thirteenth century.127 At the same time, this late medi­eval practice required the concepts and dogmas of the faith in the memory to be retained not only by the preachers but also those hearing the sermon. In truth, the recipients of sermons also needed a careful memory, in order for it to properly guide their understanding and experience of faith. Memory became a useful strategy for the mendicants whose mission was to take religion to lay people. First of all, given that the dogmas of the faith are intangible, images were needed for the memory to retain, fix, and translate these images. This process of recording appears in works of devotion like the vernacular writings of Bartolomeo de San Concordio and Matteo de Corsini in the fourteenth century. Corsini appealed to the mortis memoria, because to live an adequately Christian life “we must always think about death” (dobbiamo sempre pensare della morte), referring back to Seneca to invoke the permanent record of the past that influenced the present and the future: “if your soul is prudent, it should be organized in three periods: […] organize the present, foresee the future, and remember the past.”128 Christian symbo­logy was widely expanded, not only concerning saints, but also the virtues and vices, and adapted (often from classical images) into new forms and memorable drawings from this same mendicant milieu.129 Popular mnemonics linked to the symbo­logy used in art, generating coherent and repeated images to fill the memory and retain the very dogmas of the faith being preached by the clergy.130 Memory was not just about a capacity to retain past events or hold the path of righteousness. Habits of behaviour were reinforced by the memory. There was only one thing that had to be erased from the memory: the record of sin (“the memory of sinners in darkness”).131 Ramon Llull talked about two possible habits: “those who have or will have the holiness of glory and those others who have and will have the condemnation of sadness.”132 Memory sets the respective behaviours. Thus, holiness is recognized under the habit of kindness, glory, and charity (intelligit sub habitu bonitatis, gloriae et caritatis); the second, which featured the sinners, repeated negative characteristics, including the corresponding record: technischen Traktatliteratur im 15. Jahrhundert; mit Edition und Untersuchung dreier deutscher Traktate und ihrer lateinischen Vorlagen (Tübingen, 2000).

127  Kimberly A. Rivers, Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice: Memory, Images, and Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2010), 4. 128  “Si prudens est animus tuus, tribus dispensetur temporibus”; “praesentia ordinata, futura provide et praeterita recordare.” Cited from Matteo de’ Corsini, Rosario della vita (Florence, 1845), 37–39. 129  Rivers, Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice, 149–333.

130  Miguel Larrañaga, Palabra, Imagen, Poder: Enseñar el Orden en la Edad Media (Segovia, 2015), 410–11.

131  “Tenebre peccatorum memoria eorum.” From New Haven, Yale Uni­ver­sity Beinecke Library, Marston MS 140, fol. 52v. 132  “Quos habent et habebunt sancti de gloria, et alii sunt, quos habent et habebunt damnati de tristitia.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 2:549.

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First one needs to understand why Judas, who has a contrary habit for all his eternity, understanding intellectually the intelligible eternity in terms of punishment for evil and hate. Then comes the cloak of remembering. And these cloaks are the instruments with which the saints have eternal glory, while the damned have suffering. Judas has a cloak of conscience and despair with the cloak of sadness and the cloak of eternal intelligence, like a memory, because all these cloaks are those for eternity.133

In this sense, memory could be a memory of evil. In the eighth century, when John of Damascus talked of cholera, he saw three types: bile, rage, and mania. The latter became the permanent memory of evil: “The mania is the permanent bile, in other words, the memory of evil, and it is called mania because it persists and remains recorded in the memory.”134 Memory is the link with the entire vital journey of the human being, constantly loading the memory with everything good and everything bad. If you were to start again, you would need to lose your memory, as Dante explains when to drink from the river of forgetfulness: What are you thinking? Answer me; that the water [from the river of forgetfulness] has yet to erase your sad memory.135

Memory is a life force. Everything is memory: the words and texts that surround us, and the images. All the power of depiction that religion can master, filling cloisters and churches with reliefs and sculptures, is nothing other than the expression of a particular memory, showing why monastic buildings can be described as an “architectural mnemonic in monastic rhetoric.”136 Let us return to Frances Yates when she discusses “memory as the converting power, the bridge between the abstraction and the image.”137 Memory is an action activated by agents who wish to transmit a certain social behaviour. It has a versatile capacity, used not only by the Church, but also holders of power when they wished to influence society. We can now see how memory served at the mercy of power, and proponents of the powerful attempted to manipulate the past through its memory. 133  “Et idem est de intelligere Iudae, quod in contrarium habituatum est in aeuiternitate sua, intellectiuitate intelligente intelligibilitatem aeuiternitatem sub ratione malitiae poenae et odibilitatis. Et idem sequitur de habitu memoriae. Et isti habitus sunt instrumenta per quae sancti havent gloriam aeuiternaliter et damnati poenam. Iudas habet habitum conscientiae et desperantiae cum habitu tristitiae et cum habitu intelligentiae aeuiternae et memoriae similiter in tantum quod omnes habitus erunt ita appropriati aeuiternitati.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 2:549–50.

134  “La manie est la bile permanente, c’est-à-dire la mémoire du mal, et s’apelle manie parce qu’elle demeure et reste consignée dans la mémoire.” Cited from Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, Histoire des péchés capitaux au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2003), 125. 135  “Che pense? / Rispondi a me: ché le memorie triste / in te non sono ancor da l’acqua offense.” Cited from Dante, Divina Commedia, 10–12, Purgatorio, XXXI.

136  Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cam­bridge, 1998).

137  Yates, The Art of Memory, 104.



Memory as a Strategy

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The medi­eval conception of the world as a continuous path from Creation to the Second Coming, in which the history of the world and the history of salvation were entwined, encompasses the meaning of being human and the impact of one’s actions. The present was justified both by the inescapable destiny of one’s path forward whilst being deeply rooted on the path from whence we came. Power in the present thus required a justification in the past, and that link was the memory. This is underlined by the two terms used in Mary Carruthers’ magisterial work, Memory and Authority.138 The basis for authority was rooted in memory. For instance, Eginhard supported Charlemagne, primarily due to his lineage, since all his predecessors had shown their worth before Pepin was anointed king, by continuously occupying the position of Mayor of the Palace: Pepin the Short, father of King Charles, exercised this post as if it were already hereditary. In fact, Pepin’s father, Charles Martel, worthily occupied the same position, having, in turn, received it from his father, Pepin of Herstal.139

After recalling the success of Charles Martel in battle against the Muslims,140 the same chronicler adds: “The people did not tend to grant such an honourable post to anyone except those who stood out for their enlightened lineage and abundant riches.”141 Eginhard thus links wealth, continuity in the retention of power, and recognition of the lineage to popular acceptance. In reality, in early medi­eval dynastic affairs, a historical justificatory narrative contributed powerfully to popular cohesion around sovereigns, as Rosamond McKitterick concluded for the Carolingians: “A sense of the past was deeply integrated into the sense of identity possessed by the audiences for history in the Carolingian world. The Franks defined themselves in terms of their history.”142 Great churchmen in the ninth century defined, managed, and consolidated power through accurate control of the past, particularly the gesta, as Constance Bouchard writes: “The creation of this genre grew from a need to make a strange and distant past more comprehensible and to prepare a hortatory ‘mirror’ for the authors’ contemporaries; it thus demonstrates vividly the historical process of remembering and forgetting.”143 138  Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cam­bridge, 1990), 234–73.

139  “Este cargo lo ejercí�a, como si ya fuera hereditario, Pipino (el Breve), el padre del rey Carlos. De hecho el padre de Pipino, Carlos (Martel), ocupó dignamente este mismo puesto que, a su vez, le habí�a sido legado por su propio padre Pipino (de Heristal).” Cited from Eginhard, Vida de Carlomagno, ed. Alejandra de Riquer (Madrid, 1999), 59.

140  Flocel Sabaté, “La victoire de Charles Martel à Poitiers,” in L’histoire de France vu d’ailleurs, ed. Jean-Noël Jeanneney and Jeanne Guérout (Paris, 2016), 45–54. 141  “El pueblo no solí�a conceder este cargo tan honorable más que a aquellos que sobresalí�an por su esclarecido linaje y sus copiosas riquezas.” Cited from Eginhard, Vida de Carlomagno, 60.

142  Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cam­bridge, 2004), 282–323.

143  Constance B. Bouchard, “Episcopal ‘Gesta’ and the Creation of a Useful Past in Ninth-Century Auxerre,” Speculum 84, no. 1 (2009): 1–35 at 1.

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Charlemagne consolidated his power in agreement with aristocratic kinship groups, who wove a memory to reinforce the respective aristocratic groups, their monastic links, and their connection to imperial power, as summarized by Régine Le Jan : The reciprocal system of the ‘memoria’ contributed the integration of aristocratic group into the overall monastic structures of the Frankish Empire. Even if the Carolingian aristocracy still founded its legitimacy in itself, it was integrated into the structures of the Frankish and Christian ‘imperium’.144

In reality, the aristocratic system operating between the seventh and tenth centuries, based on cousinage,145 wove mutual, horizontal relations that helped to link dispersed kinships closely related to royalty under the invocation of common mythical ancestors, like Priam, king of Troy, to sustain the Merovingian dynasty.146 The consolidation of each aristocratic lineage meant consolidating a specific memory visualized in locations of family memory. These were rooted in ceremonies and places of burial, which were often within private churches founded on their own domains and, especially in the Merovingian era, in particular monasteries. This maintained the link between the living and the dead, with the former adapting the record of the lineage in accordance with the political context in a new Carolingian environment.147 Once the power of Charlemagne had become entrenched, supposed kinship links to the emperor and his descendents justified many lineages. In the early generations, Charlemagne’s time became a place of idealized memory, as Matthew Gabriele has written: “In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, telling stories about Charlemagne meant telling stories about a (lost) Golden Age whose contours shifted across time and space.” It was still, in reality, a way to create (literally invent) a new evocative memory; again, Gabriele says: “Each scribe who recorded the great one’s deeds or narrated the events of that Golden Age added a layer, pressing his particular memories and preoccupations into the fabric of the Charlemagne legend.”148 The bio­graphical construction of the Carolingian sovereign created a model image,149 both of its time and one projected towards posterity in idealized form. Rulers over almost all of Western Europe invoked supposed links to the Carolingian environment; in some cases this continued even into the nineteenth century.150 144  Cited from Régine Le Jan, Femmes, Pouvoir et société dans le haut Moyen Age (Paris, 2001), 108–18.

145  “Le système réciproque de la ‘memoria’ contribuait à intégrer les groupement aristocratiques dans les structures monastiques globales de l’empire franc. Même si l’aristocratie carolingienne fondait toujours sa légitimité en elle-même, elle se trouvait integrée dans les structures de l’‘imperium’ franc et chrétien.” Régine Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc, viie–xe siècle: Essai d’anthropo­logie sociale (Paris, 1995), 159–428. 146  Martin Aurell, La noblesse en Occident (ve–xve siècle) (Paris, 1996), 45–47.

147  Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc, 45–57.

148  Matthew Gabriele, An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford, 2011), 1.

149  Dominique Iogna-Prat, “La construction bio­g raphique du souverain carolingien,” in À la recherche de légitimités chrétiennes. Représentations de l’espace et du temps dans l’Espagne médiévale (ixe–xiiie siècle), ed. Patrick Henriet (Lyon, 2003), 197–224.

150  Flocel Sabaté, Expansió territorial de Catalunya (segles ix–xii): Conquesta o repoblació? (Lleida, 1996), 53–54.



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Elsewhere we see similar behaviour: King St. Stephen was held up as the source of rights and freedoms in medi­eval Hungary, a tradition that has continued almost to the present day.151 Feudalism imposed a new family structure,152 duly sanctioned by the Church, based on monogamous, indissoluble, and exogamic marriage.153 This created lineages that were maintained with the support of what Ruiz Domenec called the “memory of the feudal lords” (memoria de los feudales). This would typically include the justification of a specific genealogical path, attesting kinship ties, and providing eulogistic references. Later on, the genealogical narratives further stabilized written records and established commemorative actions.154 Such written records required management and this was commonly performed by a monastic community that was closely linked with the lineage. In the Ribagorça, a former Carolingian county south of the Pyrenees, between the eleventh and twelfth centuries up to three versions of the history of the county’s lineage were written, the last explicitly known as the Memoria renovata. These Ribagorçan chronicles contain clear historical errors, even in the identification of the Frankish kings, as historians have noted.155 It is almost commonplace to excuse errors in such primitive historical works. But research by Gener Gonzalvo shows that the errors were not down to ignorance by the monks who wrote them but rather were intentional, aimed at manipulating dates and genealogies, as the purpose of their work was to glorify the county’s lineage for purposes of legitimation and ostentation, whilst splicing together the imperial lineage of Charlemagne, the heroic deeds of the counts, and their relation to the French royal house. More specifically, the narrative aimed at consolidating specific issues, such as the patrimony, possessions, and jurisdictions, which were then in dispute, and to reinforce the patrilineal family model.156 This one example illustrates the function of the written memory, not to transmit historical narratives, but to generate them at the service of strategies of power. Even the liveliness of the story was adapted to the aims of the memory. For example, in thirteenth-century Castile, Countess Urraca, wife of Count Á� lvaro Núñez de Lara, drew on the monastery of Cañas, where she took vows after being widowed and became abbess: the story of her memory, in both written and monumental forms, was enriched in life and after her death, as circumstances required.157 151  Nora Berend “Construcciones divergentes de la memoria real en el reino de Hungrí�a: Esteban I (997–1038) en las leyes, las crónicas y la hagiografí�a,” in La construcción medi­eval de la memoria regia, ed. Pascual Martí�nez Sopena and Ana Rodrí�guez (Valencia, 2011), 54–57.

152  José Enrique Ruiz Domenec, “Système de parenté et théorie de l’alliance dans la société catalane (env. 1000–env. 1240),” Revue historique 532 (1979): 305–26. 153  Flocel Sabaté, La feudalización de la sociedad catalana (Granada, 2007), 171–91. 154  José Enrique Ruiz Domenec, La memoria de los feudales (Barcelona, 1994).

155  Ramon d’Abadal, Dels visigots als catalans, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1970), 2:323–24.

156  Gener Gonzalvo, “La memoria dels comtes de Ribagorça,” in Miscel·lània Homenatge a Josep Lladonosa, ed. Jesús Alturo i Perucho (Lleida, 1992), 79–87. 157  Ghislain Baury, “Sainteté, mémoire et lignage des abbesses cisterciennes de Castille au xiiie s. La comtesse Urraca de Cañas (av. 1207–1262),” Anuario de Estudios Medi­evales 41, no. 1 (2011): 151–82.

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Monasteries in their turn concerned themselves particularly with ingraining the memory of certain saints associated with them, reinforcing those stories that supported devotional imagery. The aim was to attract the faithful. Significantly, attempts to increase the memory of certain saints tended to coincide with problems and tensions within the monastery about its incomes or jurisdictions.158 The same monastic scriptoria that catered for the memory of the religious house, and especially its donors, also manipulated, sometimes inextricably, the monastery’s heritage.159 Monasteries paid strong attention to these writings, if need be by resorting to forgeries,160 in order to maintain their sources of revenue or to triumph in lawsuits in which they were involved.161 At the same time, reinforcing the lineage meant not only emphasizing a certain historically- based story but also visualizing and displaying it. Memory took advantage of the corresponding signum or figura to remain indelible in the shared knowledge of a society so familiar with symbolism.162 For instance, heraldry on military equipment from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries offered a memorable emblem for each lineage.163 Locations or buildings asssociated with lineages offered other locales for the memory, and heraldry often took on these references. Heraldry, lineage, and memory became interweaved within strategies of family consolidation. All levels of the nobility participated in this game and adapted their arms. In many cases, as in Castile, these were enriched with references to the origins and success of the family. By the fourteenth century, in the words of Faustino Menéndez Pidal, it reached “The definitive fixing and codifying of the coats of arms gave them a marked character of remembrance of the ancestors and their deeds, constituing the spiritual heritage of the lineage.”164 158  Javier Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad en la España medi­eval. Castilla y León (siglos xi–xiii) (Huelva, 2002), 92–95.

159  Leticia Agúndez San Miguel, “Memoria y cultura en la documentación del monasterio de Sahagún: la respuesta de la fórmulas ‘inútiles’ (904–1230),” Anuario de Estudios Medi­evales 40, no. 2 (2010): 847–88.

160  Leticia Agúndez, “Escritura, memoria y conflicto entre el monasterio e Sahagún y la catedral de León: nuevas perspectivas para el aprovechamiento de los falsos documentales (siglos x a xii),” Medi­evalismo 19 (2009): 261–85. 161  Flocel Sabaté, La feudalización de la sociedad catalana (Granada, 2007), 195–200.

162  “When, in the same text, Latin in turn uses words like ‘signum’, ‘figura’, ‘exemplum’, ‘memoria’, ‘similitudo’—all terms which can be translated in modern French as ‘symbol’—it does not do so indifferenttly but instead chooses each of these words carefully because each one carries an essential nuance.” (Quand, dans un même texte, le latin utilise tour à tour des mots comme “signum,” “figura,” “exemplum,” “memoria,” “similitudo”—tous termes qui en français moderne peuvent se traduire par “symbole”—il ne le fait pas indifférentment mais au contraire choisit chacun de ces mots avec soin parce que chacun est porteur d’une nuance essentielle.) Cited from Michel Pastoureau, Une histoire symbolique du Moyen Âge occidental (Paris, 2004), 11.

163  Michel Pastoureau, Traité d’heraldique (Paris, 2003), 24–36.

164  “La definitiva fijación y codificación de los escudos de armas les daba un marcado carácter de recuerdo de los ascendientes y de sus hechos, constitutivos del patrimonio espiritual del linaje.“ Faustino Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, “El linaje y sus signos de identidad,” in Estudios de Genealogía, Heráldica y Nobiliaria, ed. Miguel Á� ngel Ladero (Madrid, 2006), 12–28 at 23.



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All noble lineages told a tale of a long, unbroken, vigorous history, “the importance of being ancient (la importancia de ser antiguo),” showing a real “hunger of lineage (hambre de linaje).”165 The wealth and distinction of the lineage justified its identity, legitimated in the various conflicts it was involved in,166 reflected by the social relations of each noble, and the focus for continuing economic and social ascent.167 Accordingly, many lineages link to mytho­logical, biblical, or classical origins. There was no lack of fantastic origins: the Anjou, Berry, and Lusignac families claimed descent from the fairy Melusina, as Jean d’Arras wrote in the fourteenth century, following a request from the Duke of Berry.168 Likewise, the Haros, in the Iberian Peninsula, drew on fantastic origins around the Goat-footed Lady (“Dama del Pie de Cabra”).169 Alternatively, a memorial story could be based on a dark past, justified simply because “there was no argument against it from human memory (Que memoria de omnes no es en contrario),” as stated by the Basque nobility, showing how memory could be manipulated by those of preeminent status.170 The strengthening of the agnatic lineages in the late Middle Ages, with the preoccupation both to conserve and extend the family heritage and play the game of matrimonial strategies, always tended to be accompanied by the search for, and invocation of, genealogical stories;171 more than a few times a single family could find itself with various origins, thus reinforcing its antiquity and contacts.172 The view was to the past and the future, which is why the stories were duly continued, as with the Castilian Libro del linaje de los señores de Ayala.173 These memorial stories were also used for lesser lineages when they could not produce an ancient chrono­logy. Whether middling or lower nobles, they all resorted to such origins. A Castilian knight, Sancho de Paredes, who had been chamberlain to Queen Isabella the Catholic, flaunted his position by erecting a palace in his home city of Cáceres, including a specific Arms or Lineage Room. The decoration of the room was finished 165  Cristina Jular, “La importancia de ser antiguo. Los Velasco y su construcción genealógica,” in La conciencia de los antepasados. La construcción de la memoria de la nobleza en la Baja Edad Media, ed. Arsenio Dacosta, José Ramon Prieto, and José Ramón Dí�az de Durana (Madrid, 2014), 201–36.

166  Maria Consuelo Villacorta, “Creando memoria: Pedro López de Ayala y Lope Garcí�a de Salazar,” in Memoria e historia. Utilización política en la Corona de Castilla al final de la Edad Media, ed. Jon Andoni Fernández de Larrea and José Ramón Dí�az de Durana (Madrid 2010), 74–75.

167  Miquel À� ngel Ladero, Poder politico y sociedad en Castilla. Siglos xiii al xv (Madrid, 2013), 393.

168  Jean d’Arras, Melusina o la noble historia de Lusignan, ed. and trans. Carlos Alvar (Madrid, 1982).

169  Luis Krus, “Una variante peninsular del mito de Melusina: el origen de los Hara en el ‘Livro de Linhagens’ del Conde de Barcelos” and Krus “La muerte de las hadas: le leyenda genealógica de la Dama del Pie de Cabra,” in La conciencia de los antepasados, 17–42 and 43–86 respectively. However, see the work of Isabel Beceiro, “La legitimación del linaje a través de los ancestros,” in Memoria e historia, 91–93. 170  Cited from Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Clio’s Laws on History and Language (Austin, 2019), 47.

171  Isabel Beceiro, “La memoria y el discurso de la nobleza en los relatos genealógicos castellanos (1370–1540),” in La conciencia de los antepasados, 122–43.

172  Beceiro, “La legitimación del linaje,” 85–87.

173  Arsenio Dacosta, El ‘Libro del linaje de los señores de Ayala’ y otros textos genealógicos. Materiales para el estudio de la conciencia del linaje en al Baja Edad Media (Bilbao, 2007).

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during the sixteenth century, but, at the building’s conception, at the start of the century, elements proclaiming his lineage were introduced. We see his family arms accompanied by portraits of his ancestors, although there are only eight of them and they only date back to the fourteenth century. They are accompanied by the heraldic shields of the respective spouses’ families, showing the role of matrimonial links not only financially but in glorifying the lineage. A text in Castilian crowns the room: This work was commissioned by the honourable knight Sancho de Paredes, son of the most honourable knight Alonso Holguí�n and chamberlain to the most powerful and most Catholic Queen Isabel, our lady. Beginning with Pero Domingo Golfí�n, over two hundred years ago, who was a neighbour of this town and whose wife is not remembered and others whose wives’ arms are presented. The said Pero Domingo had a son Alonso Pérez Golfí�n whose son was Pero Alonso and whose son was Alonso Golfí�n, and of Alonso Golfí�n, Alonso Holguí�n and whose son was Sancho de Paredes and whose son was Ferna Pérez Golfí�n. Finished in the year 1508.174

We can see here a portrait of an heir looking assuredly to the future while the ostentatious decoration displays his present wealth, but all rooted in the memory of the lineage, displayed with pride, though he is simply a rich knight keen to show off his prestige and the power he gained through service to the crown. At the time, medical understanding of procreation argued that bodily fluids transmitted not only physio­logical traits but also moral virtues or defects.175 The son of a king might inherit his authoritarian traits,176 or the son of a Jew might have a characteristic such as fearfulness.177 That is why St. Bernard received virtues through his mother’s milk,178 just as the Castilian writer, don Juan Manuel, traced bad character traits to the milk of a bad wet-nurse.179 Such views reinforced the importance of lineage. It was common in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in discourses praising barons and nobles, which is why texts had to adopt “the theme of unknown youth prepared to make his name as a knight and to establish a position in society on the basis of his own exploits, without the help 174  “Esta ovra mandó facer el onrado cavallero Sancho de Paredes, hijo del mui onrado cavallero Alonso Holguí�n i camarero de la mui poderosa e mui católica reina dona Isabel nuestra señora. Comiença de Pero Domingo Golfí�n, que puede aver docientos años, que fue vecino d·esta villa i d·él no ai memoria quien fue su muger y de los otros se ponen las armas que tovieron sus mujeres. Del dicho Pero Domingo fue hijo Alonso Pérez Golfí�n i d·él fue hijo Pero Alonso i d·él fue hijo Alonso Golfí�n, i de Alonso Golfí�n, Alonso Holguí�n i d·él fue hijo Sancho de Paredes i d·él fue hijo Ferna Pérez Golfí�n. Acabose año de mdviii.” Cited from “Sala de Armas o de linajes” in Pilar Mogollón, Guía del Palacio de los Golfines de Abajo (Cáceres, 2015), 50–51. 175  Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexualidad y saber médico en la Edad Media (Bar­ celona, 1989), 55–57.

176  Stefano Maria Cingolani, “El ‘Llibre de l’infant en Pere’. De la sutil frontera entre realidad y ficción en la historiografia,” Talia dixit 7 (2012): 79–80.

177  Teresa Alsina, “La imatge visual i la concepció dels jueus a la Catalunya medi­eval,” L’Avenç 81 (1985): 54–56 at 54. 178  Jacques de la Voragine, La Légende dorée, trans. Teodor de Wyzewa, facs. repr. (1911; Paris, 1998), 440.

179  Cruz Montero Garrido, La historia, creación literaria. El ejemplo del Cuatrocientos (Madrid, 1994), 206.



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of a known and well-established family reputation,” whilst keeping “a strong emphasis on heredity.”180 Three things were necessary to judge a knight, the prime one being lineage, as stated in the mid-fourteenth century at the Aragonese court: “This knowledge is obtained in three ways. The first, which lineage they are descended from; the second, what manners and customs they have; the third what exploits they have achieved.”181 So, dynastic continuity, displaying one’s roots, and continuing success, became central to the claims to power by lords, and especially sovereigns. What was important was the dynasty, more so even than any individual monarch. By the fourteenth century, this meant hiding the monarch and focusing on the royal lineage: “the invisibility of the king and the visibility of the dynasty (L’invisibilità del re e la visibilità della dinastia).”182 Portraying continuity of succession from the beginning was crucial, whilst enumerating all the members of the dynasty from its origins, observed in the royal palaces of Castile, France, and Aragon between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.183 Royal speeches, chancery documents, chronicles, the overall care of archives and libraries, all show this same memorial policy. Memory was deeply embedded in strategies for promoting late-medi­eval monarchies. Assuming one could present longevity in the transmission of values and successes, genealogical and dynastic memory became essential for the legitimacy of power.184 This was explicit in the kingdom of Leon, where “the memory of the ancestors acquires a fundamental role in the process of creating the image of the king and his power.”185 It could sometimes be difficult to integrate a positive narrative of one’s ancestors, such as trying to eulogize a dynastic memory involved in the murder of Thomas Becket, who was immediately accepted by the Church as a martyr.186 Sometimes

180  Elspeth Kennedy, “The Quest for Identity and the Importance of Lineage in Thirteenth-Century French Prose Romance,” in The Ideals and Practice of Medi­eval Knighthood, 2: Papers from the Third Strawberry Hill Conference, 1986, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge, 1988), 70–86 at 75.

181  “Aquesta conexença ha a esser en tres maneres. La primera de quiny linyatge venen; la segona de quinyes maneres et costumes son: la terçera quinys fets han fets.” Cited from Próspero de Bofarull, Procesos de las antiguas cortes y parlamentos de Cataluña, Aragón y Valencia, 8 vols. (Barcelona, 1847–51), 6:23.

182  Flocel Sabaté, “L’invisibilità del re e la visibilità della dinastia nella Corona d’Aragona,” in Il principe invisibile, ed. Lucia Bertolini, Arturo Calzona, Glauco Maria Cantarella, and Stefano Caroti (Turnhout, 2015), 27–63.

183  Elí�as Tormo, Las Viejas series icónicas de los reyes de España (Madrid, 1917); Roland Reicht, “Le portrait et le principe e réalité dans la sculpture: Philippe le Bel et l’image royale,” in Europäische Kunst um 1300. Akten des xxv International Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte (Vienna 4th–10th September 1983), ed. Hermann Fillitz and Martina Pippal, 6 vols. (Vienna, 1986), 4:189–201. 184  Ana Rodrí�guez, “La preciosa transmisión. Memoria y curia regia en Castilla en la primera mitad del siglo XIII,” in La construcción medi­eval de la memoria regia, ed. Pascual Martí�nez Sopena and Ana Rodrí�guez (Valencia, 2011), 295–324 at 295–96.

185  “El recuerdo de los antepasados adquiere un papel fundamental en el proceso de creación de la imagen del rey y su poder.” Cited from Inés Calderón, “La memoria de los reyes de León (1157–1230),” in La construcción medi­eval de la memoria regia, 169–89 at 175.

186  John Hudson, “Derecho, escritura y memoria real en Inglaterra, ca. 870–1215,” in La con­ strucción medi­eval de la memoria regia, 209–20 at 219–20.

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there was legitimate doubt, allowing room for ambiguity, such as with Crown of Aragon and Peter the Great, who died in 1285 in dispute with the Holy See and excommunicated.187 We have seen how memorialistic narratives could link to powerful or mythical origins188 but were adapted to each case.189 By the Late Middle Ages chronicles subsumed these dynastic narratives into what has accurately become known as the “memory of the kings (memòria dels reis).”190 It was no accident that this all took shape with the ongoing development of centralized administrations191 that generated and looked after corresponding royal or governmental archives.192 The memory of the dynasty consolidated sovereign power. Royal pantheons were also part of this strategy. In the mid-fourteenth century in the Crown of Aragon, King Peter the Ceremonious began a policy of locating and dignifying the tombs of all his predecessors. He respected the place chosen for burial by each of his predecessors but wanted those around him and successors to share one royal pantheon in the Cistercian monastery of Poblet. This reflected a belief that they would resurrect together on the day of judgement: “we and our sons, who in a similar way have chosen our tombs, so that, on judgement day, we will be resurrected together with the said kings, our predecessors.”193 The choice of monasteries called on to host royal pantheons had to demonstrate they were capable of developing adequate liturgical ceremonies for eternal salvation and, at the same time, serve as a bridge between legitimizing the past, presenting current glories, and projecting the future. We see just this at the start of the twelfth century when Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile adopted the Cluniac monastery of Sahagun as a royal pantheon.194 Noble families showed the same concerns as royal lineages; first, the concern to depict a complete course from the family’s origins through to eternal salvation. Resurrection held a central position in late-medi­eval religion,195 and was well represented in 187  Carlos López, “Conservar y construir la memoria regia en tiempos de Jaime I: los archivos reales,” in La construcción medi­eval de la memoria regia, 387–414 at 412. 188  Luí�s Krus, A construçâo do passado medi­eval (Lisbon, 2011), 182–83.

189  Gaetano Lalomia, “Per un’etica della ‘memoria’ e letteratura sapienziale castigliana del XIII secolo,” in Memoria: Poetica, retorica e filo­logía della memoria. Atti del xxx Convegno Inter­ universitario di Bressanone (18–21 luglio 2002), ed. Gianfelice Peron, Zeno Verlato, and Francesco Zambon (Trento, 2004), 49–74. 190  Stefano Maria Cingolani, La memòria dels reis. Les quatre grans Cròniques (Barcelona, 2007).

191  Bernard Guenée, Occidente durante los siglos xiv y xv. Los Estados (Barcelona, 1973), 103–217.

192  Andrea Calzolari, Rosanna Cosentino, “La memoria dell’amministrazione: l’archivio camerale sabudo a partir dal XIV secolo,” Études Savoisiennes. Revue d’histoire et d’Archéo­logie 3 (1994): 47–51.

193  “Nos e nostres fills qui semblantment hi havem elegides nostres sepultures, per ço que ensemps resucitem ab los dits reys nostres predecessors al dia del juhí�.” Cited from Antoni Rubió y Lluch, Documents per l’historia de la cultura catalana mig-eval, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1908), 1:300. 194  José Luis Senra, “En torno a un espacio de evocación: las ‘Res gesta domini Adefonsi’ y la iglesia monástica de Sahagún,” in La construcción medi­eval de la memoria regia, 243–92 at 287–89.

195  Shirin Fozi, “‘Reinhildis Has Died’: Ascension and Enlivenment on a Twelfth-Century Tomb,” Speculum 90, no. 1 (2015): 158–94.



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churches,196 in particular with the image of the tomb-covers opening following the call of the Lord (such as at the expressive west front of Saint-Seurin’s monastery in Bordeaux). In the Catalan parish church of Sant Salvador de Vilanova de Meià, the Gothic relief reproduces this very image, explicitly, with the heraldic signs of the resurrected showing they were the members of the local seigneurial family. The connections between noble lineages and religious centres became fixed by the late Middle Ages, reinforced by the prevailing feudal structure. A religious centre would provide the scriptorium where the story of the memory of the lineage could be assembled, the monks would guarantee the fate of the deceased from the lineage for all time, and display, as the deceased awaited resurrection, how the family’s wealth grew through the increasing wealth of the tombs. Indeed, the term memory acquired a specific meaning in monasteries in the central part of the Middle Ages, when the Gregorian Reform from the 1080s required a different relationship with patrons. Memory was dedicated to recording prayers, masses, and various forms of commemoration of the donors.197 In 1382, the aforementioned King Peter the Ceremonious of Aragon commented that the same monastery where he expected all the deceased of the royal family to be gathered was wanted for the same purpose by lineages elsewhere: “there are also queens and the dukes, our daughter in law and sons, our grandsons, counts and barons, knights, citizens, and townspeople who have chosen their burial place here.”198 In fact, the families establishing themselves as an urban oligarchy intertwined their own interests with those of the towns and cities where they had taken root since the twelfth century and we can observe similar strategies of consolidation. These families developed a comprehensive policy to gain representative functions and hold local political power, while strengthening their positions through marriage alliances.199 Bourgeois families also appealed to their origins, but often through the invention of a family past.200 They invoked ancient origins but foregrounded their successes, both professional and familial. From the fifteenth century, they often put this in writing, generating a specific family memory201 in which they intentionally mixed economic affairs 196  Matilde Azcárate, “Iconogragfí�a de la Resurrección en al escultura gótica española,” En la España Medi­eval 5 (1986): 169–93.

197  Arnoud-Jan A. Bijsterveld, “Do ut des:” Gift Giving, ‘Memoria’ and Conflict Management in the Medi­eval Low Countries (Hilversum, 2007), 158–87.

198  “Aytambé de reynes e de la duquessa nostra nora e fills, néts nostres, comtes e barons, cavallers, ciutadans e homens de viles qui han aquí� eletes lurs sepultures.” Cited from Rubió y Lluch, Documents per l’historia de la cultura catalana, 1:300. 199  Catalonia serves as an example: Flocel Sabaté, “Ejes vertebradores de la oligarquí�a urbana en Cataluña,” Revista d’Història Medi­eval 9 (1998): 127–40.

200  Christiane Klapish-Zuber, “L’invention du passé familial a Florence (xivè–xvè s.). Temps, mémoire, tradition au Moyen Â� ge,” in Actes du xiiie Congrès de la Société des Historiens Médievistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur Public (Aix-en-Provence, 4–5 juin 1982) (Aix-en-Provence, 1983), 97–118. 201  Marí�a Luz Mandingorra, “La configuración de la identidad privada: diarios y libros de memorias en la baja edad media,” Historia. Instituciones. Documentos 29 (2002): 217–35 at 218.

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with more emotive family traits,202 often beginning narratives that were then continued by later members of the same family.203 The writings show an interest in preserving surprising facts or those considered curious or transcendental,204 mixed with the desire to provide solid, deep roots showing the sustained ascent of the family. This often required manipulation of documents and historical re-creation. It is worth mentioning the case of the late-medi­eval Bell-lloc bourgeois family in Girona. They had no qualms about hiding their humble origins as furriers by manipulating parchments that referred to this and starting a narrative linking the origins of the family with the founders of the country, thus moving it closer to alleged Carolingian origins.205 Taking due care of the memory also applied to the institutions the bourgeois families promoted. As municipal governments grew in statute they would create their own archives where they stored the memory of the rights they had acquired206 and so build their own identities.207 All municipal officers were involved in these games of power and took care to create and preserve their archives.208 How did they justify their status? In many cases, by invoking founding laws or charters, and using their own civic legal system to generate a communal memory.209 This created social cohesion and a sense of collective solidarity shared by the members of one entity, visible in shared activities and actions.210 Collective acts made visible the shared urban identity. We see display of heraldic symbo­logy, which, in many cases, included references to historic origins.211 Towns and cities adopted narratives that involved a memory of an identity born in characters from classical and biblical mytho­logy. Noah appears frequently, and even more so Troy, which provided a wished-for continuity back to Greece and Rome.212 The historical discourse 202  El llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà, ed. Elena Cantarell, Mireia Comas, and Carme Muntaner (Lleida, 2011).

203  Duccio Balestraci, La zappa e la retorica. Memorie familiari di un contadino toscano del Quattro­ cento (Florence, 1984), 155–79.

204  Reyes Rojas, “La memoria de lo privado por lo public. Los escribanos públicos sevillanos,” Historia. Instituciones Documentos 31 (2004): 577–81. 205  Josep Fernández i Trabal, Una família catalana medi­eval. Els Bell-lloc de Girona 1267–1533 (Barcelona, 1995), 32–33.

206  Pascual Martí�nez Sopena, “Los concejos, la tradición foral y la memoria regia en Castilla y León,” in La construcción medi­eval de la memoria regia, 135–68 at 158–65.

207  Thérèse de Hemptinne, “Des sources pour une histoire des villes compare? Essai de typo­logie thématique,” in La ville médiévale en débat, ed. Amélia Aguiar Andrade and Adelaide Millán da Costa (Lisbon, 2013), 27.

208  Maria Teresa Iranzo, “Memoria cí�vica: el archivo medi­eval del concejo de Huesca,” Aragón en la Edad Media 19 (2006): 259–72. 209  Paolo Miceli, Derecho consuetudinario y memoria. Práctica jurídica y costumbre en Castilla y León (siglos xi–xiv) (Madrid, 2012), 178–80. 210  Flocel Sabaté, El sometent a la Catalunya medi­eval (Barcelona, 2007), 9–25.

211  Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Du modèle à l’image: les signes de l’identité urbaine au Moyen Â� ge,” in Le verbe, l’image et les réprésentations de la société urbaine au Moyen Age, ed. Marc Boone, Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, and Jean-Pierre Sosson (Antwerp, 2002), 189–205. 212  Colette Beaune, “L’utilisation politique du mythe des origines troyennes en France à la fin du



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of each city, incorporating its list of successes, was fundamental in creating and maintaining an awareness of identity among rising communal powers like the Italians213 or the Flemish.214 The case of the Annales ianuenses is well known and illustrative. They were first written by Caffarus in the mid-twelfth century to provide an official memory for Genoa as it grew into an international power.215 Collective municipal self-expression used the same philosophical and theo­logical approaches that justified the recognition and participation of the populus as a legitimate power at the end of the twelfth century.216 A sense of nation could be built around collective identities and specific cultural traits, traced from the classical epoch into the Early and Late Middle Ages.217 From the thirteenth century on, legal, philosophical, and theo­logical support grew across Europe for the concept of nations of people, identified as units with common cultural traits, especially a shared language. Naturally, there was no shortage of elites who wanted to claim to be its embodiment or representative, and sovereigns who wanted to subsume this entity.218 In all cases, a popular sense of a nation and its political embodiment meant establishing a specific memory also linked to founding myths.219 It was not only a question of generating a self-supporting memory of one’s own origins or a memory storehouse with various elements well organized in order to be able to defend rights and incomes when and where needed. Supposedly representative entities, like municipalities or even permanent parliamentary delegations like the General Deputation of Catalonia, conspicuously fed a public memory through narratives and diaries often backed by a notary who certified the news as “kept by the witness of the present for future memory (Per memòria en esdevenidor presents per testimoni).”220 In Lleida, the book was headed with a classical reference to justify the need to collect the events for the common memory of the city: Moyen Â� ge,” in Lectures médiévales de Virgile. Actes du Colloque organisé par l’École Française de Rome (Rome, 25–28 octobre 1982) (Rome, 1985), 331–55.

213  Chris Wickham, “The Sense of the Past in Italian Communal Narratives,” in The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Paul Magdalino (London, 1992), 173–89.

214  Anne-Laure Bruaene, “S’imaginer le passé et le present: conscience historique et identité urbaine en Frandre,” in Memoria, comunitas, civitas. Mémoire et conscience urbaines en occident à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Hanno Brand, Pierre Monnet, and Martial Staub (Ostfildern, 2003), 167–80. 215  Gabriella Airaldi and Alex Mallett, “Annales Ianuenses, mxcix–mclxiii,” in Christian-Muslim Relations 600–1500, ed. David Thomas and Barbara Roggema (Leiden, 2009), accessed November 9, 2019 < http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1877–8054_cmri_COM_25003>.

216  Philippe Buc, “‘Principes gentium dominantur eorum’: Princely Power between Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Twelfth-Century Exegesis,” in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Thomas N. Bisson (Philadelphia, 1995), 310–28 at 324–26. 217  Georges Tugene, L’idée de nation chez Bède le Vénérable (Paris, 2001), 80–81.

218  Flocel Sabaté, “‘Amar la nostra nació’,” in Sardegna e Catalogna, ‘officinae’ di identità. Riflessioni storiografiche e prospettive di ricerca, ed. Alessandra Cioppi (Cagliari, 2013), 15–62.

219  Flocel Sabaté, “Els referents històrics de la societat: identitat i memòria,” in L’Edat Mitjana. Món real i espai imaginat, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Catarroja and Barcelona, 2012), 22–23. 220  Lleida, Arxiu Municipal de Lleida A–700, fol. 1v.

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In line with the sentence by Seneca and all the other moralists, all wise and prudent people should not only organize and run current affairs and provide for the future ones, but also memorize and record those of the past. Mainly those that for their rarity or singularity are worthy of record. That is why the same Seneca says that he who does not recall things from the past loses his life. And so doctors and other men of science in whose faculties knowing that the memory of mortals is fragile and expires, have wished, through important study, to arrange the knowledge of the past and put it into writing so that the things of the past do not fall into oblivion but instead, in contrast, their successors should have an assiduous record and memory.221

The record of events worthy of remembrance and lessons for current behaviour have to be extracted from the past. The municipal authorities in Lleida echoed these arguments, while noting the lack of written registers (“it would not have been possible to find in the said books or registers records of behaviour in severe cases”) and the lack of recall among younger legislators: “the said honourable councillors, who are in the prime of youth, have no memory of such deeds because they have never seen them.”222 Memory had to be living, constantly fed and fattened. So, the same people who took the decision to create a specific memorial book for the city of Lleida also demanded that their future successors continue this work for ever: We earnestly pray and exhort all the successors in this office, when new cases happen, which are unique and worthy of memory, to include them in this book started and devoted to such things. It must be written by whoever is then secretary, because those who will succeed in government can better and more quickly manage and react to events.223

Other municipal governments, such as Barcelona, wanted the collection of the civic memory to be constantly maintained by an external body.224 In general, much of what is 221  “De les persones sàvies e prudents se pertany segons sentència de Sèneca e de tots los altres morals no solament ordenar e dispondre les coses presents e provehir a les esdevenidores, mas encara memorar e recordar-se de les passades. Maiorment d’aquelles que per llur raritat o singularitat són dignes de recordació. E per ço diu el mateix Sèneca que aquell qui no cogite res del passat pert la vida. E axí� los doctors e altres homens de sciencia en quiscunes facultats sabents la memòria dels mortals esser fràgil e caduca, han volgut ab sobiran studi ordonar moltes coses ja passades e aquelles posar e redigir en scrits per ço que no fossen en oblició posades mas los llurs successors haguessin aquelles en assí�dua recordació e memòria.” From Lleida, Arxiu Municipal de Lleida, A–700, fol. 37r. 222  “No és estat cercat que en los dits libres o regestres no s’ès trobat que per al cas urgent exemplar pogués ésser tret”; “los dits honorables pahers qui són en la flor de llur joventut constituï�ts no havien memòria de semblants actes com non haguessin may vists.” From Lleida, Arxiu Municipal de Lleida A–700, fol. 37r.

223  “Pregants encara e exortants afectuosament tots los qui succehiran a ells en lo dit ofici que si s’esdevindran algunes coses noves, singulars e dignes de memòria vullen aquelles fer continuar en lo present libre principiat e dedicat per a tales coses per lo qui lladonchs serà scriva per forma e manera que los qui succehiran en lo regiment mills e pus promptament puxen ordenar e expedir les ocorrents e procegir en aquelles.” From Lleida, Arxiu Municipal de Lleida A–700, fol. 37v. 224  Besides the “Crònica del racional de la ciutat de Barcelona (1334–1417)” (Recull de Documents i Estudis, 1 no. 2 (1921): 113–92), in Barcelona the Manual de Novells Ardits, a diary of the municipal council, has been published in 28 vols: Manual de Novells Ardits, vulgarment apellat Dietari Antich Consell barceloní (Barcelona, 1892–1975).



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gathered in this type of book has been neglected by historians and taken as merely anecdotal. On the contrary, they reflect what really mattered for groups, like municipalities, and what was considered worthy of entering into memory. They tend to reflect jurisdictional tensions with other powers and neighbours, thus showing the relative power of towns and cities in their regional context; ordinations and internal agreements, showing the importance of aligning the interests of the different communities and cultural minorities like the Jews; and, notably, celebrations involving the sovereign ruler usually always appear in great detail. This was done with the intention of appearing to show a confluence of interests when negotiating, at the appropriate time: “the city and our will which will always be joined to everything that will be of service to your Excellence.”225 There was no shortage of comments on surprising phenomena linked to nature, particularly when they affected harvests, or showed the vulnerability of the natural landscape, allied to the fact that all such phenomena were still viewed as messages to be interpreted.226 Thus, capturing what they considered surprising is significant. Conflating these aspects, they tried to configure a civic memory, with the purpose of generating internal cohesion in political management; we observe this in many large municipalities at the end of the Middle Ages. We have seen in all these examples, at all levels of society, the importance of invoking an origin consistent with one’s present interests. Rather than some ongoing narrative, memory serves to supply origins that serve as a basis from which to confront struggles for power in the present. Consequently, conflicting memories can exist in the same place and at the same time. That is why there has been talk of “memories of the classes.”227 Fifteenth-century Catalonia furnishes a good example, because the king and the baronial and municipal estates were each seeking preeminence, each invoking a different story about the origins of the country: the former mentions an initial concession by the Carolingian sovereign to the Count of Barcelona; the barons extolled the knights of yore, whilst linking them to the leading lineages of the day, which founded the country, expelled the Muslim invader, and prepared the way for Charlemagne; and people invoked an alleged initial pact between these knights and the native population, 225  “La ciutat y nostra voluntat la qual estarà sempre aparellada a tot lo qeu serà del servey de vostra Excellència.” From Lleida, Arxiu Municipal de Lleida, A–700. fol. 153r.

226  On June 1, 1458, the diary of the General Deputation of Catalonia noted: “Thursday, first day of June, Corpus Christi day. Whale. This day, stranded on the sea-shore beyond the mouth of the Llobregat, a whale as long as a 22-oar galley. Many people thought that a great prince would soon die and, in fact, at the end of the same month, the king Alfonso of Aragon died” (Dijous, primer dies de juny. Corpus Christi. Balena. Aquest die donà a travers en lo ribatge de la mar d’allà lo cap de Llobregat una balena del llarch de una galiota de xxii banchs. Molts presumiren que no·s trigaria a gayre que morria algún gran prí�ncep e, de fet, a la fi d’aquest mes, morí� lo rey Alfonso d’Aragó). Cited from Dietari de la Generaltiat de Catalunya, ed. Josep Maria Sans Travé, 5 vols. (Barcelona, 1994), 1:142. 227  Carlos Laliena, “La apropiación mí�tica del pasado: poder real, legitimación y memorias de clase en Navarra y Aragón en el siglo XIII,” in Memoria, mito y realidad en la historia medi­eval. xiii Semana de Estudios Medi­evales (Nájera, del 29 de Julio al 2 de Agosto de 2002), ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia (Logroño, 2003), 61–84.

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pre­figuring the agreement between barons and burghers.228 All the participants in the struggle for late -medi­eval power were backed by their own memory. At Sardinia, during a period of calm in the second half of the fifteenth century, each political level wrote its own historical narrative, generating contemporary histories of the island from different standpoints, royal, baronial, and municipal.229 So, we can talk about a clash of memories. When Patrizia Sardina analyzed power conflicts in the Sicilian city of Agrigento between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, she asserted that it was a “maze of memory” (labirinto della memoria).230 A confrontation can try to eliminate the opponent’s memory directly: the Castilian royal chronicler Diego Enrí�quez del Castillo explained that the rebels not only imprisoned him, but also seized his writings, with the clear intention of damaging the royal memory: Despite guarantees, I was imprisoned in the city of Segovia when it fell, through treason, in the hands of disloyal knights. They stole my things and the registers, with everything I had written in them, given that memory, due to human weakness, tends to forgetfulness than recollection.231

On other occasions, when a struggle for power sought agreement rather than confrontation, the memories also came into play, combining the different historical tales and memory. As David Nogales has pointed out, icono­graphic series of the late-medi­eval Castilian–Leonese monarchy did not always arise from a simple wish to exalt the royal dynasty: the royal series in cathedrals arose from an ecclesiastical desire to curry royal favour for religious interests, sometimes to generate finances needed to build a cathedral.232 In another case, that of late-medi­eval Portugal, legitimation articulated around the memory of the noble lineages generated an “Old Book of Lineages” (Livro Velho de Linhagens) for the leading families before the end of the thirteenth century. At that moment, the monarchy was incapable of constructing a memory of the kingdom around itself for at least another century.233 When the Portuguese monarchy did achieve this, it was not at the expense of the old narrative of the nobles, but was adapted “in the image 228  Flocel Sabaté, “É� tats et alliances dans la Catalogne du bas Moyen-Â� ge,” in Du contrat d’alliance au contrat politique. Cultures et societies politiques dans la peninsula Ibérique à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. François Foronda and Ana Isabel Carrasco (Toulouse, 2007), 297–360 at 344. 229  Anna Maria Oliva, “‘Rahó es que la Magestat nostra sapia’. La Memoria del sindaco de Cagliari Andrea Suner al sovrano,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Italiano per il Medio Evo 105 (2003): 297–300.

230  Patrizia Sardina, Il labirinto della memoria. Clan familiari, potere regio e amministrazione cittadina ad Agrigento tra Duecento e Quattrocento (Caltanissetta, 2011).

231  “Fui preso sobre seguro en la cibdad de Segovia quando fue dada por trayción a los caballeros desleales; donde me robaron no solamente lo mí�o, mas los Registros con lo procesado que tenia scripto de ella, visto que la memoria, según la flaqueza humana, tiene mayor parte de la olvidanza, que sobra de la recordación.” Cited from Diego Enrí�quez del Castillo, “Crónica del Rey Don Enrique el Cuarto,” in Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla, ed. Cayetano Rosell, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1953), 3:100.

232  David Nogales, “Las series iconográficas de la realeza castellano-leonesa (siglos xii–xv),” in Estudio de Genealogía, Heráldica y Nobiliaria, ed. Miguel Á� ngel Ladero, En La España Medi­eval supplement (Madrid, 2006), 81–111 at 91. 233  Luí�s Krus, A construçâo do passado medi­eval (Lisbon, 2011), 172–79.



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and the model of noble heroes and their respective linguistic references,”234 as a way of adapting the historical events to the memorial necessity of each individual and group.235 Thus, memory is not some superficial dressing but is deeply embedded in tensions generated as various groups assert their hold on or claim to power. Indeed, events converted into memory largely reflect present conflicts.236 Moreover, the memories of one’s lineage guide decision-making, so they serve as worthy, successful precedents to sustain the dynasty or lineage going forward, in a clear adaptation of the classical “imitation of the customs of the ancestors” (imitatio morum parentum).237 In 1357, King Peter the Ceremonious explained to his uncle, Prince Peter, how, facing the Castilian invasion, he brought to mind numerous actions by his predecessors, remarking that in the present, decisions should be based on lessons from the past: Firstly, starting with King Peter, you know he often placed himself in danger, and that is why he was feared and defended himself from his enemies. Then, you know about King Alfonso, who with few armed companies prepared to fight the king of Castile, who had invaded his kingdom, and then the king of Mallorca, who with three others had invaded his kingdom. Then King James, your father, you know that when he was in Murcia, which had been seized from the king of Castile, and he went there and he had to organize in all his kingdom so that everyone went, at the same time as he communicated to the Castilian king that he had surprised him and that he did not count on his people, but that if he waited for him, he would take up the fight. Also you should know that the king our father, when the Moors went to Guardamar, and another time went to Elche, he did not wait at all and went to fight them. You know also the advice you gave us when James of Mallorca came to Conflent: that we did not allow any king to oppress our land because we could properly prevent it.238

234  “A imagem e o modelo dos herois nobiliárquicos e seus respectives referenciais linhagisticos.” Cited from Fátima Regina Fernandes, “Estratégias de legitimaçao linhagí�stica em Portugal nos séculos xiv e xv,” Revista da Faculdade de Letras: Historia ser. 3, 7 (2006): 263–84 at 283. 235  Fátima Regina Fernándes, “O poder do relato na Idade Média portuguesa: a batalha do Salado de 1340,” Revista Mosaico 4, no. 1 (2011): 75–86.

236  William J. Purkis, “The Past as a Precedent: Crusade, Reconquest and Twelfth-century Memories of a Christian Iberia,” in The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Lucie Doležalová (Leiden, 2010), 444–61.

237  Stefano Maria Cingolani, “Memòria, llinatge i poder: Jaume I i la consciència històrica,” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics 19 (2008): 101–27 at 107.

238  “Primerament, començant al rey En Pere, sabets que per aventurament de sa persona con fon temut e duptat e com se defès de sos enamichs. Après, sabets lo rey N’Anfós com ab poques companyes parà batalla a rey de Castella, qui li era entrat en son regne, e puys a rey de Mallorches, qui era ab tres tants e li era entrat en son regne. Aprés, lo rey En Jacme, vostre pare, sabets que com era a Múrcia, que havia tolta al rey de Castella, e el rey de Castella hi vench, que tramès per tot son regne que tot hom hi anàs, e féu saber al dit rey de Castella que ell era stat soptat e que no havia ses gents, mas que si l’esperava, que ell se combatria ab ell. Aprés, sabets que·l rey nostre pare, con los moros vengueren a Guardamar, e altra vegada con vengren a Elx, no sperà res, sinó que se’n anà devers ells per combatre’s ab ells. Aprés, sabets vós quin consell nos dés con En Jacme de Mallorches vench en Conflent: que no soferí�ssem que rey nos calcigàs nostra terra, pus vedar ho poguiéssem covinentment.” Cited from Romà Gubern, Epistolari de Pere III (Barcelona, 1955), 142–43.

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The sovereign knew the history of his own dynasty, and took decisions influenced by his recollection of the dynastic past. You could say that history was master, with royal libraries taking care to stock history books, and sovereigns like that of the Aragonese flaunting their reading and knowledge.239 It was a question of remembering past events to act correctly in the present and not repeat errors. It had been precisely Cicero’s intention when he addressed the Roman citizens, reminding them of the evils of past history, while appealing for these to be retained in the memory: “surely you have them in the memory (nam profecto memoria tenetis).”240

The Guided Memory

Recording was accepted by everyone as a necessary means of formulating lessons from the past to guide the future. Anyone in power in medi­eval society had reasons to retain and invoke the memory, either to brandish it in specific disputes or to display a glory that should help in future struggles. It forms a written tradition on which to base both the invocation of a past with which one is supposedly linked and convert successes in the present into guidelines for the future. A duty not to forget was in fact a stipulation for the future. The Benedictine Pierre Boutier, accompanying the Frenchmen Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de La Salle on their expedition to the Canary Islands in 1402– 1404, experienced this intensely. While accepting the duty to memorize, he wrote it all down, as in this explanation for why he wrote Le Canarien: Because in the past it was customary to write down the military exploits that princes and conquerors used to perform, as found in old tales, we want to mention here the deeds undertaken by Gadifer de La Salle and Bethencourt, knights who are native of the kingdom and France.241

The memory of ancestors never has a simple anecdotal function; it always serves a purpose for the present and has a desired effect for future generations. The Florentine ambassador, Francesco Guicciardini, indicated this in the words with which he began his Memorie di famiglia: Having news of one’s elders, especially if they have been brave, good, and honourable citizens, is not only useful for descendents but also a continuous stimulus to behave in a way that these praises are not a reproach. For this reason I prepared to write a memory about the qualities of our progenitors, not only for my own records but also for these who have yet to come, and, doing so not for pomp but its utility, telling the truth of what we are coming to know, including failures and errors, so that he who reads it is encouraged not only to imitate the virtue, which do exist, but also to know to shun the vices.242

239  Sabaté, “L’invisibilità del re e la visibilità della dinastia,” 44–50.

240  Cited from Cic. Catil. 3.19 (Cicero, Cataline Orations 3 / Oratio in Catilinam Tertia ad Populum, 19).

241  “Porque antaño se acostumbraba poner por escrito las hazañas militares que los prí�ncipes y los conquistadores solí�an realizar, tal como se encuentra en las antiguas historias, nosotros queremos referir aquí� la empresa que han acometido Gadifer de La Salle y Bethencourt, caballeros naturales del reino e Francia.” Cited from Eduardo Aznar, Dolores Corbella, Berta Pico and Antonio Tejera, Le Canarien. Retratos de dos mundos, 2 vols. (La Laguna, 2007), 1:79. 242  “L’avere notizia de’ maggiori suoi e massime quando e’ sono stati valenti, buoni ed onorati



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We see a society surrounded by historical references that appealed to different memories, but all part of a common social destiny. It was not very different from what occurred in the Roman era, as we can see from Cicero’s testimony. He shows Roman citizens surrounded by a portrayal of both divine references—“simulation of the gods” (simulacra deorum)—and earlier civic models—“statues of ancient people” (statuae veterum hom� inum)—without forgetting their origins: “he who founded this city, Romulus, who we can contemplate in the Capitol when he was a boy and suckling from teats of the nature of the wolf.”243 The permanent presence of the memory means sharing not only remembered facts but also their interpretation: in other words, a shared political and cultural community. References to deceased members of the royal family always include their clare memoriae or eximie memorie.244 This is not mere protocol: if the sovereign fell into disgrace after death, his memory would no longer be invoked in the most respectful and highest tones. For example, we find this in Aragon in royal documentation referring to James III after he ceased to be king of Mallorca or, in the fifteenth century, about Peter “IV” when he failed in his attempt at the throne during the Catalan Civil War. The record that would remain became negative, as Peter the Ceremonious wrote about his son-in-law and opponent on Mallorca: “James of Mallorca did many evil and treacherous things against us, so many that I cannot mention them all.”245 The memory, always alive, adapted to changing political circumstance. The same happened in Portugal with the narrative around King Sancho II, finally removed from power as a “rex inutilis.”246 In short, memory is guided. It can be directed and, so, manipulated, even created. Ramon Llull recognized this: the memory is composed of what is gathered from the surroundings and, so, can accept as truth ideas that have not been duly checked or confirmed: Memory is truth, in other words, it records real events, and when it cannot recall events of truth it enters into a contrariety, one that affects the three basic branches: the vegeta-

cittadini, non può essere se non utile a’ descendenti, perché è uno stimulo continuo di portarsi in modo che le laude loro non abbino a essere suo vituperio; e per questo rispetto io ho disposto fare qualche memoria delle qualità de’ progenitori nostri, non tanto per recordo mio, quanto etiam per coloro che hanno a venire; e faccendolo non per pompa ma per utilità, dirò la verità delle cose che mi sono venute a notizia, etiam de’ diffetti ed errori loro, acciò che chi leggerà s’accenda non solo a imitare le virtù che hanno avute, ma etiam a sapere fuggire e’ vizi.” Cited from Francesco Guicciardini, Diario del viaggio in Spagna. Memorie di famiglia (Pordenone, 1993), 39.

243  “Ille qui hanc urbem condidit, Romulus, quem inauratum in Capitolio parvum atque lactentem uberibus lupinus inhiantem fuisse.” Cited from Cic. Catil. 3.19. 244  Gerard Marí�, “La memòria de Blanca d’Anjou i Jaume II en la lluita pel control de l’hospital de la Font del Perelló (1308–1443),” Acta historica et archaeo­logica Mediaevalia 29 (2008): 350–68.

245  “Molts d’altres tractaments malvats e traï�dors féu depuis e tractà lo dit En Jacme de Mallorques contra nós, los quals no puc adur a acabament.” Cited from Pere el Ceremoniós, “Crònica,” 3.207, in Les quatre grans Cròniques, ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona, 1983), 1090. 246  Jose Varandas, “Um papa. Um rei. Uma sombre. A deposiçâo de D. Sancho II: a imagem régia entre fragmentos de memória,” Clio. Revista do Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa 16–17 (2007): 155–80.

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tive, the sensitive and the imaginative, all of which affect the memory, and so sometimes it believes it recalls the truth and in reality it is the contrary.247

We have seen in this introduction how memory is essential to humanity and provides the necessary building blocks for both individual and collective identity. A close link also exists between memory and power in various aspects. Memory, the root of discourses of personal affirmation, social cohesion, and political reference, can be exposed to the weaknesses of the physical memory, political interests, and the wider environment. But memory can easily obfuscate and bear greater or lesser self-awareness, through fiction248 or, at least, carry a bias, given that memory, in contrast with history, is not based so much on knowledge of the past as a specific selection or even reworking of this past.249 Memory plays a central position in the construction of identity, inspiring us to explore the ideo­logy that aims to guide memory.

247  “Memoria est de ueritate, idcirco recolit uera, et cum uera recolere non potest, contrariatur et contrarietas, quae est inter brancas elementatiuae, uegetatiuae, sensitiuae et imaginatiuae, cum quibus ipsa memoria participat; eti ideo saepius credit uera recolere, et recolit in contrarium.” Cited from Lullus, Arbor Scientiae, 1:203. 248  Néstor A. Braunstein, La memoria, la inventora (Mexico City, 2008), 208–09; Peter A. Levine, Trauma and Memory. Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past (Berkeley, 2015), 15–50.

249  Jaume Aurell, “Memoria, historia i identitat: el debat teòric,” Idees 28–29 (2006): 65–79 at 77–78.

Chapter 1

MEMORY AND THE BODY IN MEDI­EVAL MEDICINE FERNANDO SALMÓN Introduction I’m going to give you the names of three things and I want you to repeat them to me and in a while you recall them, alright? Bicycle, spoon (without writing them down? Without writing them down, without writing them down…), bicycle, spoon, apple.1

This was the opening to the trailer for the documentary Carles Bosch presented in 2010 after spending two years with his camera following Pasqual Maragall, the ex-mayor of Barcelona and president of the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Government of Catalonia), who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007. The loss of short-term memory revealed by this simple test was an indication of a more general mental deterioration and finally, the loss of one’s own identity. It is striking that at a time and in a society where the training of memory has been reduced to a vestige of what happened in an often criticized educational past and where all kinds of techno­logical devices lead to the effective disembodiment of its intended functions, it is precisely the progressive loss of individual memory that marks the agonizing step from being to not-being. It seems that, faced with the process of dissolution of the “I,” we can only wait and hope for a new and improbable “magic bullet” to be offered by advances in neuroscience, while care networks, remunerated or not, struggle to offer basic care to patients who are ever more dependent.2 We might expect that in another historical time and in a society like the late-medi­ eval, where memory was essential in cultural life and one of the highest values for a *  My thanks to Flocel Sabaté for the stimulating challenge he posed by suggesting this theme and to Montserrat Cabré and Michael McVaugh for their careful reading of the text and their suggestions. The research of this paper is based on the research projects El cuerpo humoral en la medicina medi­eval europea (HAR2011–25135) and El cuerpo vivo: procesos de transformación corporal en la medicina medi­eval (HAR2015–63995-P MINECO/FEDER), both financed by the Ministry of Research of the Government of Spain.

1  “Te voy a decir el nombre de tres cosas que quiero que me repitas y que para dentro de un ratito, te acuerdes, ¿vale?: bicicleta, cuchara (¿sin apuntar? Sin apuntar, sin apuntar…), bicicleta, cuchara, manzana.” Cited from http://www.bicicletacucharamanzana.com/, accessed June 26, 2011.

2  Philip D. Sloane et al., “The Public Health Impact of Alzheimer’s Disease, 2000–2050: Potential Implication of Treatment Advances,” Annual Review of Public Health 23 (2002): 213–31.

Fernando Salmón ([email protected]) is professor of History of Science at the Uni­ versidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain.

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human being,3 its change or loss would also be the subject of social concern and interest by physicians. However, the assumption that changes to basic functions of our organism must necessarily be understood in any time and place as problems that medicine must solve is a misleading premise that can easily lead to error, as medical anthropo­logy and the history of medicine have frequently shown.4 So, to tackle the theme of this chapter, the first question should be whether, in late-medi­eval Latin society, memory and its loss were considered an issue to be conceptualized and dealt with by academic medicine. We will see that surviving university sources, both the texts read and those produced in the medi­eval universities, invite us to respond affirmatively. It would also be useful to ask if, alongside the great development and implantation of mnemonic techniques and memory-training that characterized the period,5 medi­ eval medicine itself identified a central role for memory and changes in memory when dealing with mental function in general. In this case, an affirmative answer can also be given, but somewhat qualified. Medicine showed little interest in memory, at least if we compare it with its contemporary social value and with the theoretical and practical attention that was dedicated to reason in the medical classroom.6 However, not only does the minimal interest and scanty social pressure for medicine to pay more attention to memory contrast with what is shown today, but medi­eval ways of conceptualizing and interrogating the body were completely alien to those we currently employ. So, before entering into a discussion of the relation between memory and medi­eval medicine, I would like to comment briefly on the body that medi­eval medicine acted upon; then, I will discuss memory within the general explicative framework that Latin medi­eval medicine proposed for brain function and its alterations. I will end by explaining some specific practical recommendations about how to preserve memory found in medical literature of the fourteenth century.

3  Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medi­eval Culture (Cam­bridge, 1990); Mary J. Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds., The Medi­eval Craft of Memory: An Antho­logy of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, 2002).

4  Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York, 1988); Cecil Helman, Suburban Shaman: Tales from Medicine’s Frontline (London, 2006); Peter Wright and Andrew Treacher, The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine (Edinburgh, 1982); Charles Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cam­bridge, 1992). 5  Frank Willaert, Herman Braet, Thom Mertens, and Theo Vanckeleer, eds., Medi­eval Memory: Image and Text (Turnhout, 2004).

6  Reason was granted preeminence among the three internal senses by, for example, Arnau de Vilanova (ca. 1240–1311), master of the medical school in Montpellier. See Arnau de Vilanova, De parte operativa, fol. 46va–vb. In this article all references to the De parte will refer to the only surviving manu­script: Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CLM 7576, fols. 39ra–55rb. At the moment I am working with Michael McVaugh on its critical edition and analysis, to be published as volume 7.2 of the Arnaldi de Villanova Opera medica omnia (Barcelona, forthcoming).



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A Medi­eval Body for Physicians

For a modern audience, the history of a body as defined by medicine must be a history explained in images of the anatomical structures that make it up. Given the growing demand for a medical techno­logy centred on the image, the promise of seeing inside ourselves is very effective and hugely comforting in moments of uncertainty when faced with disease.7 This can be seen very g­ raphically in the documentary referred to at the head of this chapter. The simplicity of the three-word test that provides the basis for the CODEX (Cognitive Disorders Examination) contrasts with the techno­logical complexity of the scanners that confirm cerebral deterioration through diagnosis using images. Seeing has been, and still is, the mark of objective scientific knowledge, and the subjective experience of our bodies in health and sickness can be supported or called into question by the images of those parts of ourselves we cannot see through the mediation of machines and experts.8 Looking back in time, it would seem that the aim of seeing and then depicting a body defined by parts with clear and separable outlines has always lain behind the Western medical tradition. The incorporation of anatomical dissection as part of the regular activities in the newly created faculties of medicine in the thirteenth century and, despite its crudeness, the illustration of medical manu­scripts with depictions of the body support this interpretation.9 However, it would be a mistake to assume that medi­eval people understood the human body and the uses of anatomical dissection as we do today. In fact, cutting someone up, even if it were a dead body, is not the inevitable consequence of wanting to know our bodies better, nor is its naturalistic or quasi-photo­graphic representation. It is not so in some medical systems in use today (such as traditional Chinese medicine) and has not been so historically.10 It is even less so if the conceptual framework that supports the healing activities is based on humoralism, a holistic medical system where health and disease are seen as conditioned by the balance or imbalance of bodily components of a fluid nature, called humours. In the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition, the humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm) were the material and visible substrates of the four basic qualities—cold, heat, moisture, and dryness—that were themselves characteristic of the four elements—air, water, earth, and fire—that made up the human body. The combination of the primary qualities characterized the specific complexion or temperament of the individual and his or her parts. Each person had a complexion that depended on different variables—

7  Kelly A. Joyce, Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency (New York, 2008).

8  Margaret Lock, Alan Young, and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., Living and Working with the New Medical Techno­logies (Cam­bridge, 2000). 9  Roger K. French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot, 1999).

10  Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York, 1999).

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age, sex, place and time of birth, etc.—and each part of the body would have its particular complexion.11 This does not mean that the different bodily functions—for example, memory—did not have a precise anatomical location; in the case of memory, it was the posterior brain ventricle. However, the morpho­logical contours of a bodily part and its spatial position were less important than its qualitative characteristics in determining the diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic actions called for by medi­eval medicine.12 The complexional body was quite distinct from ours: there was no separation in it between the physical and the psychic, and the different parts that make up the bodily economy were, in health and in sickness, in a continuous dynamic interaction between each other and what surrounded them. In broad terms, this was the morpho­logical and functional model that medi­eval medicine used to understand the localization and working of memory, without the need to open the brains of the living or the dead (neither men nor animals), and without the need to depict it ­graphically except as a mnemonic strategy. It was a brain that did not have to be seen but had to be understood and explained logically (fundamentally teleo­logically) in both health and sickness.13 Scholasticism as the method of inquiry that dominated the medi­eval academic world meant that the technical vocabulary and interpretative framework of the mental functions were practically interchangeable among physicians, theo­logians, and natural philosophers.14 However, medical studies had a specific particularity: their theoretical approach needed to offer a satisfactory explanation not only of the normal working of these functions but also of their alterations. This particularity, real or developed rhetorically to mark out their own professional space, was often used by university medical masters to justify the absence of debates about certain themes that raised greater interest in the schools of arts or theo­logy. The argument that solving certain problems of a complex, theoretical resolution would have no clinical or diagnostic implications meant that important issues that affected the economy of cerebral workings were not debated in the medical classrooms where, and following the authority of Avicenna, two truths that were not mutually exclusive were handled: one medical and the other philosophical.15

11  Vivian Nutton, “Humoralism,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. William F. Bynum and Roy Porter, 2 vols. (London, 1993), 1:281–91. Peregrine Horden and Elisabeth Hsu, The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice (New York, 2013).

12  Luis Garcí�a Ballester, La búsqueda de la salud. Sanadores y enfermos en la España medi­eval (Barcelona, 2001), esp. 129–59. 13  Fernando Salmón, “The Body Inferred: Knowing the Body through the Dissection of Texts,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body, ed. Linda Kalof (Oxford, 2010), 77–97.

14  In this sense, it is interesting to compare two classical works: Karl Sudhoff, “Die Lehre von den Hirnventrikeln in textlicher und ­graphischer Tradition des Altertums und Mittelalters,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 7 (1914): 149–205; Harry A. Wolfson, “The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophical Texts,” Harvard Theo­logical Review 28 (1933): 69–133.

15  In fact, the treatment Avicenna gave the internal senses in his well-known medical compendium, the Canon, and the one he offers for this problem in his Liber de anima is a good example of these differences. Compare the second and fourth pars by Avicenna, Liber de anima seu



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The Brain and its Functions

How did medi­eval medical masters explain the brain and its functions? In the university classroom, the most common approach was for the brain and the mental functions to be discussed when the head was studied following the vertical order of the body, in the classic approach “from head-to-heel” (de capite ad calcem).16 Prior to this, the medical student would already have learned that in the corporeal economy proposed by Latin Galenism, the functions of sense perception, motion, and knowledge were the expression of a faculty or power—virtus—transmitted by a material vehicle, “spirit” (spiritus animalis), of an extremely subtle nature. Based in the brain, the so-called “animal power” (virtus animalis) transported by the animal spirit was responsible for sense perception (through the five external senses), for the functions of knowledge (through the internal senses: imagination, reason, and memory) and for voluntary movement. As with other bodily functions, these were influenced by the so-called “six non-natural things” (sex res non naturales); we shall see below what these were and how they influenced memory. The medical student would also have learned how the normal functions could be altered by things that, according to Galenism, went “against nature” (res contra naturam), in other words, things that caused disease, its symptoms, and disease itself.17 Each of the senses, external and internal, had a defined function and a specific localization. The internal senses were traditionally located in the brain, which was divided into two large cells, anterior (divided into right and left) and posterior, linked by a smaller intermediate one. From front to back, the three cells contained respectively imagination, reason, and memory in a complexional order of decreasing humidity. In accordance with the characteristic teleo­logical scheme of natural philosophy and ancient medicine, where Nature always did what was more convenient to meet its ends, the imagination was localized in the frontal and moister part of the brain because this suited better its functions of capturing, combining, and storing the sensitive species. Memory was in the rear cell, which was a drier area that allowed the more effective and lasting impression of memories and the things learned. This front-to-back order also followed a pattern of growing abstraction. The external senses were acted upon by the species of their sensible objects (colour for sight, sound for hearing, and so forth). For this process to take place, the student was told, the actual physical presence and temporal coincidence of the object to be perceived were necessary, something that was not required for the internal senses to work. Thus, a path of sextus de naturalibus, ed. Simone van Riet (Leiden, 1968–72) with Avicenna, Liber canonis tocius medicinae (Venice, 1527), fol. 75r-v (bk. 1, treatise 1, doctrina 6, chap. “De virtutibus animalibus comprehendentibus”). 16  In this section, I follow the arguments developed in Fernando Salmón, “‘Quis enim possit investigare rationes, imaginationes et memorias anime?’: Las funciones del cerebro y sus alteraciones en la medicina escolástica,” Quaderns d’Italià 11 (2006): 11–28, esp. 16–20.

17  For an overview of the things called natural, non-natural, and contra naturam, see Juan A. Paniagua, “La pato­logí�a general en la obra de Arnaldo de Vilanova,” in Studia Arnaldiana. Trabajos en torno a la obra médica de Arnau de Vilanova, c. 1240–1311, ed. Juan A. Paniagua (Barcelona, 1994), 211–84.

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increasing abstraction was developed as the animal spirit travelled through the brain from front to back, separating the physical object of perception further and further from the theoretical concept, which could finally be stored as a memory in the posterior cell. This scheme reflected the acceptance in the medical classroom of the model of sense-perception proposed by Aristotle, a model that by the thirteenth century had been transformed by its Arab and Latin commentators and, then, interpreted through the lens of the bodily scheme proposed by Galenism.18 Combining these basic elements, the model of brain functioning as it was used by physicians in the classroom and at the bedside was fundamentally material and very similar to that developed to explain less complex bodily functions than the mental ones. The physical metaphors of filtering, boiling, and cooking, central to the processes of purification and transformation that happened daily in the fire of the hearth or the workshops of artisans, were the basis for explaining both the origin and the normal and patho­logical workings of the animal spirit. Moreover, and despite defending the almost immateriality of this bodily component, the spatial logic of local motions was applied to justify, for example, the conclusion that the gestures of raising one’s head and tapping on the forehead were an effective way of remembering something forgotten, since this allowed a greater flow of the spirit to the posterior cell of the brain where the memory was seated. With a similar logic, inclining the head forwards and downwards was understood to help the thinking processes, given that this would lead to a greater flow of the animal spirit to the middle and forward cells. Hence, wise men were usually depicted with their heads inclined forwards. Uni­ver­sity physicians were not ignorant of other much more elaborate schemes presented by a long philosophical and theo­logical tradition developed fundamentally around Aristotle’s De anima.19 They were aware, for example, of the discussions about the possibility of knowledge without mediation or the non-anatomical attachment that some authors proposed for reason, or for the division of the internal senses into more than three.20 They were also aware of the theo­logical implications of some of these propositions, such as the arguments about the location of the soul in the brain or those about the relation between body and soul.21 On many occasions, medi­eval medical masters recognized these problems but were very cautious about placing them in the sphere of what was not really medical and, thus, fell outside their interests.22 18  Fernando Salmón, “Sources for a Galenic Visual Theory in the Late Thirteenth Century,” Sud­hoffs Archiv 80, no. 2 (1996): 167–83.

19  For an overview of the working of the internal senses in the medical tradition and natural philosophy, see Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits (London, 1975).

20  Nancy Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and his Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning (Princeton, 1981), 203–36.

21  Michael McVaugh analyzed the attitude of Arnau de Vilanova to the problem of the nature of the soul as it was developed in Arnau de Vilanova, Tractatus de intentione medicorum, ed. Michael McVaugh (Barcelona, 2000), 169–81.

22  For example, a few years before Arnau discussed the problem of the soul in De intentione medicorum (ca. 1290), from the Studium in Bo­logna the master Taddeo Alderotti solved the problem



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Beyond its conceptual delimitation for socio-professional necessities or interests, the rudimentary scheme offered for brain functioning had considerable advantages over other more complex ones. We must not forget that it responded satisfactorily to the need to explain, both in the classroom and to potential clients, an underlying mechanism that could justify the symptomato­logy and evolution of the particular diseases in which these functions were altered and could also grant sufficient theoretical authority to the proposed therapeutic interventions.

Alteration of Brain Functions

How did scholastic physicians explain mental disorders? In the interpretation of the morbid processes offered by Latin Galenism, mental illness was understood as a somatic alteration—it would be more correct to talk about brain disease—that affected the brain or any of its components and whose origin could be a general process such as a fever or a particular affliction of the head or of other parts of the body, especially the stomach and the uterus. Following the logic of the model for brain functioning described above, an imbalance in the humours or of the complexion would provoke alterations that could affect the animal spirit, the brain, or both. The spirit could be damaged directly or indirectly, and the brain cells could be affected in their substance, in their inner spaces, or in their coverings. Although in theory, and on Galen’s authority, the damage to each of the brain cells could be independent, clinical evidence showed that in most mental disturbances, except in some cases of loss of memory, their damages were combined.23 That is why the disquisitions about whether there were four, five, or seven internal senses and the discussions about the lateral or vertical subdivisions of the brain cells to which some contemporary authors dedicated special attention, were not particularly relevant for physicians. In fact, on many occasions, university physicians talked about the alteration of the “mind” (mens), incorporating the functions of both “imagination” (ymaginatio) and “reason” (estimatio), even going as far as to talk indistinguishably about “mind” (mens) and “soul” (anima).24 The material conception of the process and its radical physicality were particularly evident when justifying some altered mental states and behaviour due to specific humoral imbalances. In the De parte operativa, the only Latin mono­graphic study we know of about brain diseases, composed around 1309 by Arnau de Vilanova (ca. of the possibility that an individual could remember after death by distinguishing between two realities, natural and supernatural. It is only in the supernatural realm that this could happen, by the contemplation of the divine essence: Taddeo Alderotti, Expositiones in arduum aphorismorum Ipocratis volumen, In divinum pronosticorum Ipocrates librum, In preclarum regiminis acutorum Ipocratis opus, In subtilissimum Joannitii Isagogarum labellum (Venice, 1527), fol. 361vb. 23  Galen, Opera omnia: De interioribus (Venice, 1490), fol. 127ra (book 4).

24  Arnau de Vilanova, Opera medica omnia: Speculum introductionum medicinalium (Basel, 1585), fols. 156 and 161 and the following folios.

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1240–1311),25 the author explained how the excess of a choleric humour—where the hot and dry qualities of fire dominate—corresponds to a state of loss of reason that is characterized by the violence and aggressiveness of the sufferer, direct results of the transfer of these elementary qualities to the sphere of human behaviour. Similarly, the states of lethargy and somnolence that also would entail disorders of the memory were attributed to the predominance of a phlegmatic humour, this being dominated by the qualities of coldness and humidity of water. Where a melancholic humour dominated, its earthy characteristics would literally darken the thoughts, leading to a state of sadness and fear that characterizes the melancholic individual.26 The alteration of the characteristics of subtlety and transparency of the animal spirit would also produce alterations of the functions of both voluntary movement and those of sense perception and thought. The spirit could be altered directly, by losing transparency or increasing its thickness, or indirectly, by mixing with fumes that emanated from other parts of the body, from the stomach, for example, due to alcohol intake or the ingestion of heavy meals.27 This possibility was taken by some authors as proof for the dependence of the soul on the dispositions of the body. Arnau illustrated this point by using a classical example that showed a certain sense of humour: the metaphor of the evil servant who dishonestly serves his master. If there is an excess of sperm in the testicles, Arnau argued, this can produce fumes that rise to the brain and alter the animal spirit. This physical condition explains why, when the mind is absorbed in an intellectual activity, sexually alluring images may appear, involuntarily impeding any other type of thought. Neither the will, Arnau concluded, nor the concentration of the scholar can dominate the dictates of the body.28 This physio-patho­logical scheme used to explain the alteration of brain functions did not differ from the basic structure that Galenism used to deal with the patho­logy of other parts of the body, although in some aspects, such as in discussions on the aetio­logy of mental disturbances, factors like sleepiness and wakefulness, sex and the passions of the soul, especially sadness and fear, were of special relevance.29 25  About the date of composition and content of the De parte operativa, see Fernando Salmón, “Signa quibus cognuscuntur rationes Arnaldi?: Arnau de Vilanova’s Last Years of Medical Production,” in Arnaldo da Villanova e la Sicilia, ed. Giuseppe Pantano (Palermo, 2017), 115–27. 26  Vilanova, De parte, fol. 43va–vb (frenesis), fol. 44ra (litargia). About the influence of the material cause on various patho­logies, including melancholy, see Vilanova, De parte, fol. 47ra–rb.

27  Various examples of the consequences of this alteration of the animal spirit in visual perception are found in Fernando Salmón and Eustaquio Sánchez Salor, “Sobre el uso de la autoridad en la medicina medi­eval: Aristóteles, Galeno y las moscas volantes,” Dynamis 13 (1993): 347–71. 28  Vilanova, De parte, fol. 47va.

29  Arnau offered an original approach to this topic, even proposing a nosotaxy of the corruption of the estimative according to the concomitant passion of the soul: Vilanova, De parte, fol. 46vb. In general, it was accepted that an excess of fear or sadness could lead to melancholy. About the handling of the passions of the soul in the regimen literature, see Pedro Gil-Sotres, “Introducción,” in Regimen sanitatis ad regem aragonum, ed. Luí�s Garcí�a Ballester and Michael R. McVaugh (Barcelona, 1996), 803–27.



The Patho­logy of Memory

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Within Latin Galenism, the functions or operations of the bodily members could be defective in one of three ways: the function might be removed, it might be diminished, or it might be altered. Some of these dysfunctions were given a specific label that named a specific morbid reality, while others did not. The loss of vision, for example, was labelled “blindness” (cecitas), and blindness constituted a distinct noso­logical entity that did not represent any sort of conceptual problem. Seeing floaters or flashes of light had no particular label and simply received the name that described the type of alteration, in this case “corruption” (corruptio) of the visual function.30 In other cases, the alteration of normal operation not only had no corresponding name, but the theoretical possibility of its existence could lead to discussions of the impossibility of finding a clinical reality that tallied with this alteration, as happened, for example, in the case of the loss of the sense of touch.31 According to this approach, since there were three mental functions, “imagination” (ymaginatio), “reason” (estimatio seu cogitatio), and “memory” (memoria), it would be theoretically possible for each of these to be altered in the three aforementioned ways: complete loss, diminution, and corruption, that is, a qualitative change from its normal function.32 Some authors have tried to apply this model with mixed solutions of questionable consistency. Michael McVaugh has pointed out the difficulty medi­eval university physicians had in reconciling the scheme derived from the rigour of the scholastic classificatory logic with clinical reality and the technical termino­logy conveyed by the ancient sources.33 In fact, with memory, when the Montpellier master, Arnau de Vilanova, attempted to apply the tripartite model, he opted to include two realities under one name, proposing oblivio for both diminution and complete loss of memory and deliratio for its corruption.34 Other authors, more loyal to the received termino­ logical tradition, referred to any disturbance of memory and recollection as “corruption of memory” (corruptio memorie), ignoring the potential tripartite division. This was the approach developed by Arnau’s colleague in Montpellier, Bernard de Gordon, in his Lilium medicinae (1303–1305).35 30  Salmón and Sánchez Salor, “Sobre el uso.”

31  On this practical and intellectual debate, see Fernando Salmón, “A Medi­eval Territory for Touch,” Studies in Medi­eval and Renaissance History 3, no. 2 (2005): 59–81.

32  The similitude with the rest of the corporal functions and the possibility of applying this scheme to the functions of the internal senses was openly expressed by Arnau considering its use “as in the damage of any other function” (sicut et nocumenta cuiuslibet actionis): Vilanova, De parte, fol. 46rb.

33  Michael McVaugh, “Arnau de Vilanova and the Patho­logy of Cognition,” in Corpo e anima, sensi interni e intelletto dai secoli xiii–xiv ai post-cartesiani e spinoziani, ed. Graziella Federici Vescovini, Valeria Sorge, and Carlo Vinti (Turnhout, 2005), 119–38. 34  Vilanova, De parte, fol. 46rb–46va.

35  Bernardo de Gordon, Lilium medicinae (Paris, 1542), fol. 98v–99v. Luke Demaitre, Doctor Bernard de Gordon: Professor and Practitioner (Toronto, 1980), 51.

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Independently of the nomenclature used, what were the recommendations set out for exploring the patho­logy of memory in the medi­eval classrooms when the physicianto-be faced not the interpretive difficulties posed by the texts but rather the clinical reality of patients and their families? We do not find much original elaboration when dealing with memory, compared with the approaches devoted to other brain functions and their patho­logies. In fact, university medical masters followed fairly closely the recommendations contained in the third book of the Canon by Avicenna where, after the chapter “On stolidity and want of reason” (De stoliditate et amentia), he went on to deal with what, generally, he called “corruption of memory” (corruptio memorie). Very succinctly, Avicenna offered here some guidelines for differential diagnosis, a physio-patho­logical explanation of the alterations, and various curative and preventive measures.36 Following Avicenna’s recommendations, there was a general agreement among medi­eval authors that in the clinical setting the first problem the physician had to solve was whether the patient’s loss of memory was a symptom or an illness in itself. This typically Galenic general approach was similar to that displayed when facing other patho­ logical processes, each of which could be exclusively or simultaneously a symptom, a disease, or a cause of disease. To decide if a case of unusual forgetfulness was a symptom of another disease or an illness of the sense of memory, it was thought necessary to investigate whether the loss of memory was accompanied by a slight fever, moderate pain, and somnolence. If this were so, the physician would be dealing with a case of lethargy, one of the great classical noso­logical conditions, and thus the loss of memory would be just a symptom of this affliction.37 However, if loss of memory were the only clinical sign present, the physician would have to decide whether he was facing a case of corruption of memory proper or a case in which the patient, despite lacking the power to recall, was within the so-called latitude of health, since some people might display this condition from birth.38 Some authors qualified this point and, following the teachings of Avicenna, understood that the loss of memory that occurred in health could be a prognostic sign that warned of the onset of a brain illness.39 After discarding this possibility, the physician, in dialogue with the patient and those at the bedside, had to enquire whether the loss of memory was of recent or past events, because the cause and thus its treatment, would be different in each case. Loss of memory of recent events was thought to be a process that occurred less frequently and was explained on the basis of the existence of a dry inflammation at the 36  Avicenna, Liber canonis, fol. 149ra (book 3, treatise 4).

37  Gordon, Lilium medicinae, fol. 96.

38  “Loss of memory and corruption of memory sometimes happened within the latitude of health and can be equated to stolidity” (Oblivio igitur et corruptio memorie advenit aliquando in latitudine sanitatis et assimilatur stoliditati). Cited from Gordon, Lilium medicinae, fol. 98.

39  “And you must know that when the loss of memory takes place in a healthy individual it announces the proximity of some brain diseases such as apoplexy, epilepsy and litargy” (Et scias quod oblivio quando accidit cum sanitate nuntiat egritudines cerebri propinquas sicut apoplesiam, epilepsiam et lethargiam). Cited from Avicenna, Liber canonis, fol. 149ra.



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rear of the brain. These circumstances meant that the objects of memory could not be impressed in the posterior area of the brain, which would be harder than normal due to a local reduction in humidity. If memory loss involved an inability to recall memories of the past, then the nature of the problem was surely a moist and cold inflammation that made those memories blur and disappear, since their impression could not be maintained in an excessively humid environment.40 The model for storing memories that was assumed in these situations followed closely the metaphor of the impression of the signet-ring in wax developed by Aristotle and his commentators on the De anima and in various treatises of the Parva naturalia, including De memoria et reminiscentia, to explain the functions of sense perception and those of memory.41 In any case, although heat and dryness were possible causes of brain damage, most brain alterations were related to a complexional imbalance due to an excess of cold and moist.42 As well as affecting the brain by producing swelling and inflammation of its substance and covering membranes, the excess of these two qualities could narrow the conduits that linked the brain cells, hindering the movement of the animal spirit, while also causing its increasing thickening and heaviness.43 Once the right diagnosis had been established on causal grounds, the student learned that treatment should aim at compensating the complexional imbalance. Within this diagnostic and therapeutic framework, discussions concerning the precise localization of the affliction could be left aside due to its limited clinical relevance. In any case, however, neither the original medi­eval Latin medical literature about brain functioning nor the works in the Greco-Arab tradition showed much interest in the diagnostic and therapeutic problems posed by the loss of memory, when compared with that devoted to reason. What we do find is an interest in drawing up certain rules of a preventive nature aimed at avoiding damage to memory and ensuring its preservation.

The Aphorisms on Memory

One of the best-known medi­eval treatises dedicated to the subject of memory is a collection of aphorisms composed around 1300 by Arnau de Vilanova that circulated under the name of Aphorismi de memoria, Canones de memoria, or Canones de conservanda sanitatis cerebri et memoria. The authenticity of Arnau’s authorship was confirmed by Paniagua and Gil-Sotres in their 1993 edition. The treatise, both in manu­script and in print, circulated widely both in Latin and in the vernacular. A late Catalan translation has survived from the fifteenth century.44 40  Gordon, Lilium medicinae, fol. 98; Alderotti, Expositiones, fol. 361v.

41  Aristotle, On the Soul. Parva naturalia. On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett, 5th ed. (Cam­bridge, 1986). 42  Avicenna, Liber canonis, fol. 149ra; Gordon, Lilium medicinae, fol. 99.

43  Vilanova, De parte, fol. 47rb.

44  Arnau de Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum series: Aphorismi particulares, aphorismi de memoria, aphorismi extravagantes, ed. Juan A. Paniagua and Pedro GilSotres, Opera medica omnia Arnaldi de Villanova 6.2 (Barcelona, 1993), 217–20 and 365–76.

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This popular work illustrates well the practical application of the functional and patho­logical scheme presented above and its development within the humoral model of the body shared by physicians and their clients. The physician, as the aphorisms make clear, directed his interventions while considering a brain whose functions were located in specific anatomical sites, but within a humoral framework that emphasized the clinical relevance of the qualitative dynamic relations established within the brain itself and between this and the rest of the body. In turn, this complexional brain could not be conceived in isolation from what surrounded it, and these relations were fundamental for preserving its health or as a cause of its disease. The rationale that informed medical advice on how to avoid damaging the memory and how to reinforce its preservation was based on the so-called “six non-natural things” (sex res non naturales) typical of Latin Galenism,45 and the regimen of health literature that became widespread, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although there were variations among different authors and traditions, the “six nonnatural things” were the following six groups, five of them linked in pairs: the first (aer), the “air” and the environment, understood as everything that surrounded the body, including things as close to it as clothing; the second was “motion and rest” (motus et quies), the former understood as the functioning of a member (for example, the eye seeing) or as a local motion. The third (cibus et potus) refers to “food and drink,” although taking this in a wide sense to include all the mineral, plant, and animal substances that can interact with the body as medicines when ingested (modifying the body without themselves being modified) or as foods (being modified by the body and transformed into a part of it). The fourth non-natural thing deals with “sleep and wakefulness” (somnus et vigilia). The fifth pair refers to “repletion and evacuation” (repletio et evacuatio) that includes, for example, sexual relations and sets the theoretical framework that justifies such acts as preventive bleeding. Lastly, there are the so-called “accidents or passions of the soul” (accidentia animi) that belong to these “non-natural things” and can clearly affect health by producing a physical effect within the whole organism (joy, for example, which sets the vital spirit and the innate heat in motion, expands the heart, and cools it, and so was beneficial for the whole body) or in one of its members (for example, the clouding of sight during a fit of rage from the fumes generated in an almost boiling heart).46 How was this scheme applied to the care of memory? Presuming the functional scheme mentioned above, but without making it explicit, Arnau’s aphorisms offered some practical recommendations that were simple to use and also easy to memorize. It is tempting to suggest that the omission of a greater theoretical support discloses the fact that physicians and their audiences shared a common phenomeno­logical under45  Luí�s Garcí�a Ballester, “On the Origin of the ‘Six non-natural things’,” in Galen und das helle­ nistische Erbe, ed. Jutta Kollesch and Diethard Nickel (Stuttgart, 1993), 105–15. 46  For a detailed analysis of the “six non-natural things,” their use in the regimens of health, and the difussion and circulation of the regimen literature, see Gil-Sotres, “Introducción,” 471–885; Marilyn Nicoud, Les régimes de santé au Moyen Âge. Naissance et diffusion d’une écriture médicale (xiiie–xve siècle) (Rome, 2007).



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standing of the body: a bodily model with a long tradition in the ancient and medi­eval Mediterranean basin that was both conceptualized and experienced, taking into account not just its morpho­logical characteristics but more importantly its qualitative ones. In the case that concerns us, the brain was thought of as a set of interconnected cells through which travelled a spirit responsible for the operations of sensitivity and thought and whose complexion was cold and moist. The rear part of the brain had to have a relatively drier complexion than the middle and fore, since dryness was needed to allow the proper impression and storage of the objects of memory. An imbalance in relative dryness, an alteration of the subtlety of the animal spirit, or an invasion of the brain cells by fumes given off from other parts of the body, would alter the correct functions of remembering and recalling. The narrative that sustained the accountability of this physio-patho­logical scheme was richly illustrated with examples taken from everyday life. It explained why people forgot what had happened after heavy drinking by the rise of alcoholic vapours that blurred and distorted the brain’s handling of the objects of memory. It explained the difficulty old people have with remembering the immediate past: the ageing brain suffers a progressive process of drying up, which makes the posterior cell of the brain excessively dry and thus impedes the impression of new memories. The general state of somnolence and laziness that occurs after a heavy meal offered proof of the ascending fumes provoked by long and heavy digestions. The gesture of tapping oneself on the forehead when trying to remember, mentioned above, demonstrated the very existence of the animal spirit, an otherwise invisible component of the body. This same rationale supported the advice contained in the aphorisms that Arnau offered following a somehow disordered scheme of the sex res non naturales. Dealing first with the influence of the environment on memory, Arnau recommended avoiding excesses of both cold and heat, warning that excessive cold, especially at night, damages the memory, particularly if the head is uncovered.47 Logically, the excess of the cold/moist pair would decrease the relative dryness necessary for the right functioning of the memory. Intense heat, on the other hand, confuses judgement and also damages memory, although in this case it would do so indirectly by altering reason48 and by increasing the fumes that rise to the brain and invade its cells.49 The second of the nonnatural things, rest and motion, can also affect the correct hygiene of memory. Excess of rest, the Arnaldian aphorisms explained, affected memory because it enhances phlegm, that is, the cold and moist humour; excess of motion does so because it exhausts the vir47  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 217.

48  In fact, more than altering the ability to remember, heat alters the capacity to recall because this function requires the simultaneous concourse of the estimatio and the memoria. The typically Aristotelian distinction between remembering and recalling was hardly taken into consideration by physicians. Taddeo Alderotti could be an exception to this general attitude as can be seen in his commentary on the Isagoge, a work that followed Aristotelian premises closely. See Alderotti, Expositiones, fol. 361rb. 49  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 217.

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tus animalis necessary for the right performance of the animal spirit. In this case, the recommendation for strengthening memory was to do moderate physical exercise before meals and to stroll about afterwards, avoiding, for example, the quietude of the siesta.50 An appropriate handling of food and drink, the third of the non-natural things, was thought to be of special relevance for the care of memory, directly and indirectly. Directly, because the excessive consumption of foodstuffs and drinks of cold and moist quality enhances in the consumer a bodily complexion that is contrary to the dryness needed to ensure the retentive functions of the rear ventricle.51 Also directly, and linked to an occult rationale, was the recommendation, included in the aphoristic series, to eat animal brains, especially those of birds, because they were of a temperate nature and would also help brain function by similarity.52 The effect of this pair of the six non-naturals on memory could also be indirect. Certain foods and drinks were more prone than others to produce abundant fumes or vapours while being cooked in the stomach that, ascending to the brain, would invade its cells and alter the animal spirit. For this reason consuming pulses or cheeses and, in general, heavy meals that required long processes of digestion would harm the good workings of memory.53 This negative effect could, to some extent, be palliated by adding to the meals spices and aromatic herbs, such as coriander, or by eating fruits that could have an astringent property “naturally” (per naturam), like pears, or could acquire it through certain “techniques” (per artem), like roasting, as happens with chestnuts or walnuts: astringent fruits do this because they close the mouth of the stomach and prevent fumositates from rising to the brain.54 It is important to note that the scheme that justifies these measures was based on observed physical effects well known to doctors and laymen. A cooking process, like digestion, produces fumes that naturally tend to rise: the fewer vapours that rise, the fewer will accumulate in the brain and will therefore have less effect on brain function. The same logic of avoiding fumes that might rise to the head lay behind recommendations like frequently washing the feet with aromatic herbs, or sleeping barefoot to avoid excessive heat in the feet, which would otherwise generate fumes.55 All these hygienic measures, although aimed specifically at preserving memory, encouraged the general maintenance of all brain functions. Ensuring a balance between sleep and wakefulness, the fourth non-natural thing, was also important because an imbalance in either direction could damage memory 50  Aphorisms 12, 13, and 22: Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and Gil-Sotres, 218 and 220. 51  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 217 (aphorism 5). 52  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 218 (aphorism 9). 53  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 217 (aphorisms 3 and 4). 54  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 217 (aphorism 6), 218 (aphorism 7) and 220 (aphorism 23). 55  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 219 (aphorisms 19 and 20).



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on the same grounds as in the rest/motion case.56 Evacuations of superfluities, the fifth non-natural, had to be promoted not only by the intestinal and urinary paths, but also through the palate, nose, ears, and even the head, by rubbing the scalp. This led Arnau to recommend his readers to chew a resin, mastic mixed with ginger, to purge the head of the phlegm that the brain produces naturally. The process of chewing would favour the gradual evacuation of an excess of watery phlegm, which, given its cold and moist nature, would damage memory if allowed to accumulate. Arnau placed some emphasis on ensuring that these evacuations happened regularly, above all after sleep or exercise.57 Concluding its consideration of the sex res non naturales, the Aphorismi de memoria turned to the passions or accidents of the soul. As with other bodily functions, joy was thought to be the most positive emotion for the organism, and appropriate to the right functioning of memory, similar to an indulgence in honest amusements.58 Within this canonical handling of the “six non-natural things,” Arnau mentioned the benefits of the use of an electuary made with musk, a confection based on cashew nuts and raisins, and another on myrobalan.59 Other strategies recommended for reinforcing memory included mental exercises to frequently recall things seen and heard.60

Conclusion

Medi­eval university physicians showed less interest than theo­logians and natural philosophers in the study of the memory and its functions.61 They also paid less attention to the physio-patho­logy of memory and its corresponding noso­graphy than to that devoted to reason and madness. However, medi­eval medicine was able to build an efficacious model for memory in health and disease that entered into dialogue with the general bodily scheme taken for granted by its potential clients, one dominated by humoral and complexional features. The pieces of advice found in the Arnaldian aphorisms on memory, analyzed above, as well as the therapeutic recommendations found in widespread recipe collections,62 witness the public acceptance in the Middle Ages of this simple theoretical model and its success as the basis for diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic or preventive interventions. 56  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 219 (aphorism 14). 57  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 219 (aphorism 16) and 220 (aphorisms 21 and 24). 58  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 219 (aphorism 18). 59  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 220 (aphorism 25). 60  Vilanova, Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum, ed. Paniagua and GilSotres, 219 (aphorism 17). 61  Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 46–79.

62  My thanks to Montserrat Cabré for this information.

Chapter 2

JAMES I OF ARAGON, VICENT FERRER, AND FRANCESC EIXIMENIS: NATURAL MEMORY AND ARTIFICIAL MEMORY XAVIER RENEDO

Classical and medi­eval

rhetoric distinguished between “natural memory” and “artificial memory.” While the former was considered innate, the latter could be strengthened by cultivating the rules of the art of the memory which, taken from the classical world, were widely known in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this chapter I aim to explore in some depth medi­eval Catalan literature to comment on one example of “natural memory”―that of King James I and the Llibre dels fets―and two examples of “artificial memory.” In the latter case we will first examine Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis, who discusses the subject in his Ars praedicandi populo and made use of some of its elements in his prose works. Then we will look at Dominican, Vicent Ferrer who used the rules of “artificial memory” when composing his sermons. Three authors and four different types of text: a book of memories and confessions; an art of preaching and some passages from the encyclopaedic treatises by Eiximenis; and Ferrer’s sermons. In other words, an example of the good use of natural memory and various samples of the development, from theory and in practice, of the rules of artificial memory.

The “Natural Memory” of James I of Aragon

King James I (1208–1276) was, in many senses, an outstanding character, undoubtedly so in the military and political spheres, but also in the literary. His literary exploits are all the more remarkable because, although it is likely that he did not know how to write, he was able to bequeath the Llibre dels fets to posterity. This was possible partly by means of reportationes, by scribes writing down the text from the king’s lips, but in good measure thanks to the good natural memory of its author.1 We have a valuable witness to the good memory of the King of Aragon in a letter Pope Clement IV sent him on February 17, 1266. The pope, while severely reprimanding James I for his 1  I have dealt with the oral genesis of the Llibre dels fets in two articles “Dels fets a les paraules i de les paraules al llibre dels fets: observacions sobre la gènesi del Llibre del rei En Jaume,” in Translatar i transferir. La transmissió dels textos i del saber (1200–1500), ed. Anna Alberni, Lola Badia, and Lluí�s Cabré (Santa Coloma de Queralt, 2009), 91–120, and “Josep Maria Pujol, el rei En Jaume i el Llibre dels fets,” Mot so razo 12 (2013): 19–32.

Xavier Renedo ([email protected]) is Professor titular of Catalan Philo­logy at the Universitat de Girona, Spain.

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slips into the sins of the flesh, also dedicated a eulogy to him perhaps to compensate for the harshness of the criticisms: “It is clear that, above other princes of the world who have been instructed in the science of letters, the Lord has given you an excellent natural ingenuity, to which you have added much experience, ability to pronounce wise sentences, and a tenacious memory.”2 As Josep Maria Pujol has shown, Clement IV portrayed King James, “as a prince without formal education in the Latin letters, and grammar and rhetoric, but with great natural intelligence, continously enriched through his contact with men and the world, fond of wisdom literature and with a great memory.”3 This combination enabled him to overcome the hurdles posed by an education full of obstacles and shortcomings. I am not sure, though, that the naturale ingenium Clement IV talked about was really “natural intelligence.” Perhaps what the pope was really referring to was not intelligence as we understand it today, but rather ingenium as one of the qualities that, according to classical and medi­eval rhetorical traditions, a good orator had to have besides memory. If my interpretation is correct, James’s natural wit and memory would be two qualities that worked in parallel. The eulogies Clement IV dedicated to these could in fact be interchanged, because if James I’s wit could be described as tenacious―because only through tenacity could he, without knowing how to write, manage to compose a work as ambitious as the Llibre dels fets―his natural memory was excellent, to the point that it allowed him to produce the most singular bio­graphical testimony of Catalan letters and medi­eval Romanesque literature. James’s memory was natural, not an artificial memory trained in the classroom, which he had little opportunity to attend. There is no evidence that he even knew how to write. However, with the support of his prodigious memory, his natural wit made the Llibre dels fets possible. It is highly likely that, as I attempted to show elsewhere, despite not knowing how to write, he could read, so that what he learnt through his ears (sermons and the reading aloud of books) or his eyes (his own readings) was saved, like a treasure, in the solid cells of his memory. Thus, he must have learned throughout his life and thought of the daring idea of the Llibre dels fets, which is less a chronicle and more a book of spiritual memories constructed from reminiscences and experiences stored in a tenacious and powerful natural memory. Shortly before his death, King James selected a series of events from his life that contributed, as Stefano Asperti has shown, to present an image programmatically limited as a king-knight, champion of God and the faith, and a model of the Christian prince in the 2  “Sane, cum inter alios mundi principes quos litteralis sciencia non instruxit, te Dominus excellenter ingenio naturali dotaverit et experientia multa didiceris et libenter audieris sapientium sententias et tenaci memoriae commendaveris.” Cited from Matthias Thumser, ed., Die Briefe Papst Clemens’ IV. Vorläufige Edition (1265–1268) (Munich, 2015), 101.

3  “Com un prí�ncep sense educació formal en les lletres llatines i les arts de la paraula escrita, però dotat de gran intel·ligència natural, enriquida incessantment pel contacte amb els homes i les coses, afeccionat a la literatura sapiencial i dotat d’una gran memòria”. Cited from Josep Maria Pujol, “¿Cultura eclesiàstica o competència retòrica? El llatí�, la Bíblia i el rei En Jaume,” Estudis Romànics 23 (2001): 147–72 at 166.



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struggle against the infidels.4 Notable among these feats were, of course, the conquests of Mallorca and the kingdoms of Valencia and Murcia, and the unsuccessful crusade to the Holy Land in 1269. Indeed, there was room to record both battles and sieges and smaller skirmishes, sleepless nights, arguments, sometimes violent, with nobles or even soldiers, and difficulties of all kinds he had to overcome to ensure the supplies for his men or the continuity of the siege of Muslim Valencia. However, there was also room to recall domestic matters with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile,5 or the second, Violant of Hungary6 (an amorous tryst between James and Violant to celebrate the capitulation of Almenara in Muslim Valencia),7 the details of his not very successful confession to the Dominican Arnau de Sagarra, regarding his incestuous relations with Berenguera Alfonso,8 or the amiable words in Castilian that Prince Sancho of Castile, James’s grandson, addressed to him during a visit to the court of Alfonso X: “Grandfather, what you want, I want.”9 Although it may seem that some of these scenes contradict the intention, mentioned more than once in the book, to omit menuderies (secondary and insignificant anecdotes), they’re more important than they appear.10 Each episode or scene in the Llibre dels fets aims to contribute to the image of king-knight, champion of God and the faith, to bear witness, as stated in the first sentence in the book, to the conversion of the king’s faith into deeds.11 In this sense, as Pujol wrote, James I’s aim was similar to that of Gervase of Canterbury when he confessed:“I do not desire to note down all those things which are memorable, but only those things which ought to be remembered, that is, those things which are clearly worthy of remembrance.”12 4  Stefano Asperti, “Il re e la storia: Proposte per una nuova lettura del Libre dels feyts,” Romanistiche Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 3 (1984): 275–96.

5  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets del rei En Jaume. Volum II, ed. Jordi Bruguera (Barcelona 1991), 28–29 (para­graph 23). 6  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 274–75 (para­graph 361). 7  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 212 (para­graph 248).

8  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 314–15 (para­graph 426). See further, Xavier Renedo, “Jaume I es confessa (Serra de Carrascoi, principis de gener de 1266),” in El Llibre dels feits: Aproximació crítica (Valencia, 2012), 255–71.

9  “Avuelo, lo que vos en querees en quero jo.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 350 (para­graph 495). All translations of the quotations from the Chronicle of Jaume I are taken from The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon. A Translation of the Medi­eval Catalan “Llibre dels Fets,” ed. and trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery (Farnham and Burlington, 2010).

10  “And since this book is of such a nature that one should not put trifling things into it, we leave off telling many things that happened and we wish to speak of the most important matters so that the book will not be too greatly lengthened” (E quan aquest libre és aital que coses de menuderies no y deu hom metre, lexam-nos de comptar moltes coses que y foren e volem dir les majors, per ço que·l libre no s’hagués molt a alongar). Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 223. 11  “My lord St. James explains that faith without works is a dead faith” (Retrau mon seyor sent Jacme que fe sens obres morta és). Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 5. The biblical reference is to James 2:26. 12  “Non tamen omnia memorabilia notare cupio, sed memoranda tantum, ea scilicet quae digna

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Today, almost seven hundred and fifty years after the composition of the Llibre dels fets, it is sometimes difficult to find the meaning behind episodes that may, at first sight, seem insignificant menuderies or intimate and personal confessions. Perhaps the problems father Pere Marsili, the Latin translator of Llibre dels fets, had at the beginning of the fourteenth century in translating some of these episodes came from not knowing how to find their meanings. (Or, perhaps the problem is that, with the transformation of the Llibre dels fets, a kind of spiritual testament written in the first person, into a more conventional chronicle in the third person, some episodes ceased to make sense, or no longer had the same meaning.) For example, Fra Pere did not translate the confession of the “impotentia coeundi” by James I on marrying Eleanor of Castile too young, at the age of only twelve: “So we were a full year with her without being able to do what men should do with their wives, because we were not old enough.”13 To a chronicler in Latin like Marsili, these words could have seemed too personal to be included in a chronicle comme il faut. In fact, the king did not want to make intimate revelations, but rather to show that for a year he was unable to fulfil his conjugal duties as king and husband, due to his age. This is no “naï�ve confession,” or sauciness, but rather the testimony of a king who had to wait a year to consummate his marriage and give the Crown of Aragon an heir.14 A similar episode is the amorous meeting between the king and Violant of Hungary, his second wife, on the occasion of the capitulation of Almenara. According to the Llibre dels fets, once the place was occupied, the king sent two knights to the camp at Borriana in the rear, to invite Queen Violant to meet him in Almenara: And the knights said: ‘The king orders you to come, as he has dinner prepared, and you will dine better and more merrily there with him than you would do here’. And when she heard that she left her meal. And we waited there until she arrived, and then we went out to the slop at the foot of the castle and we and she entered the castle happily and we ate with great joy.15

In this passage, the prose of the Llibre dels fets, which derives from the spoken language, could not be simpler, but, at the same time, it manages effectively to express, with the reiteration of the adverb alegrament, the joy of the encounter, and, as Ferran Soldevila memoriae esse videntur.” Cited from Gervase the Monk of Canterbury, The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury. Vol. I, ed. William Stubbs (London 1879–80), 90. The English translation is cited from Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medi­eval England (London, 2004), 61.

13  “sí� que ·I· ayn estiguem ab ela que no podí�em fer ço que·ls hòmens han a fer ab sa muyler, car no haví�em la edat.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 22.

14  For the medi­eval translations and modern interpretations of this episode, Xavier Renedo, “Un matrimoni no consumat: Elionor de Castella i Jaume I (À� greda, 6-VI–1222),” in Miscel·lània en honor de Josep M. Marquès, ed. Narcí�s Figueras and Pep Vila (Barcelona, 2010), 184–91.

15  “E dixeren los cavallers:―Lo rey vos mana que vingats, que ell ha apparayllat de menjar, e que mils e pus alegrament menjarets là ab ell que no farí�ets aquí�. E ela, quan ho hoí�, lexà son menjar. E esperam-la tro que vench e exim a la costa del peu del castell, e nós e ella entram alegrament dins lo castell e ab gran alegria menjam.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 212.



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states in the notes for his edition, “the imminence of the love of the young couple.”16 In this case, there is no “impotentia coeundi,” but rather “impatientia coeundi,” the expression of the desire to satisfy the conjugal duty so the couple could have offspring as soon as possible. (Peter, their first son, was not born until 1240, two years after the surrender of Almenara.) All these details, explicit and implicit, are lost in Marsili’s version, with more complex, but also drier and less lively, syntax. When the king occupied the castle, he asked the queen to go straight there, because, after the great grace that God had granted him, the best was, for many reasons, for the queen to be in such an important place. The messenger arrived [in Borriana] at supper time during the fasting for Lent. The queen, leaving her supper aside, was quickly ready to go to the castle, where the king received her and they dined together with great joy.17

An enormous distance separates this fragment from the Liber gestorum from the corresponding passage in the Llibre dels fets. The difference is not only explained by the switch from the first person, in the regal plural, of James I to the third person of Marsili, but also by the change from the words that came, in the vernacular, from the king’s own lips, to a dry Latin prose from which any traces of James’s personal memory had evaporated. James had an excellent memory for dates. However, this was not the memory of a chronicler or a bureaucrat, but that of a man grounded in the liturgical calendar and, to a lesser extent, on the passing of the months and seasons. In other words, James did not recall the years with precision and tended to date events with religious feasts as reference points. Although it was not very common for people to remember their birthdays in the Middle Ages, James I recalled the date and place of his birth, but did not indicate the year: “And here our Lord willed us to be born in the house of the Tornamira on the eve of Our Lady Saint Mary of Candlemas.”18 He recalled the date because Candlemas 16  “la imminència de l’amor de la jove parella.” Cited from Jaume I, Les quatre grans Cròniques: I. Llibre dels feits del rei En Jaume, ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona, 2007), 318 n. 1398.

17  “In illa hora habuit rex castrum. Misitque pro regina, ut statim ueniret, significans quantam in hoc gratiam fecerat sibi Deus, decentius enim esse regina in tanto castro quam in Burriana multiplici ratione. Venitque ad eam nuntius hora cene, nam ieiunium Quadragesimale erat. Et, dimissa cena, statim que pro se parata fuerat, ad castrum iuit, ubi a rege recepta est, et simul cenam suam in nouitate gaudii perfecerunt.” Cited from Petrus Marsilius, Petri Marsilii Opera Omnia. Liber Gestorum. Epistola ad Abdalla, ed. Antoni Biosca (Turnhout, 2015), 237–38. The Aragonese translation of this passage also lacks the freshness and efficacy of King James’s Catalan: “And this way he conquered the castle of Almenara. And he immediately sent two knights to the queen, for her to go to Almenara, telling her that the place was his and that she would be better and safer there than in Burriana. And she obeyed the king’s command and went to Almenara and that was during Lent” (Et assí� cobró luego el castiello de Almenara. Et envió de continent dos cavalleros a la reina, que se’n fues ad Almenara, que era suya et que millor et más segurament estarí�e allí� que en Burriana. Et ella cumplió el mandamiento del rey et se’n fue ad Almenara, et era la ora en tiempo de Quaresma). Cited from Juan Fernández de Heredia, Libro de las gestas de Jaime I, rey de Aragón, ed. Francisco José Martí�nez Roy (Zaragoza, 2010), 217. 18  “E aquí� volch nostre Seyor que fos lo nostre naximent en casa d’aquels de Tornamira, la Vespra de Nostra Dona Sancta Maria Candaler.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 10.

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was such an important feast in the liturgical calendar, whilst, moreover, according to the story in the Llibre dels fets, it signalled the messianic character of James I.19 In fact, in the Llibre dels fets there is only one more or less complete date, the day James’s army took possession of Valencia: “And so that all may know when Valencia was taken, it was on the eve of Saint Michael’s day, in the year mccxxxix.”20 In fact, his troops entered Valencia on September 28, 1238, the Eve of Michaelmas, so, the year in the Llibre dels fets is wrong. This annotation, just at the end of a para­graph, could be an addition. However, Josep Maria Pujol noted that in 1313 this date was already incorporated into the manu­script in which the reportationes of the king’s story were collected, because Marsili copied it into the Latin translation with the same error.21 Whether this is an addition or not, the Llibre dels fets normally dates events either around liturgical feast days, as we have seen regarding his birth, or by taking events narrated in the book itself as reference points. For example, in the late summer of 1239, James I visited Montpellier. The Llibre dels fets describes his entry into his hometown in these terms: And that happened the year after Valencia was captured. We entered Montpellier on Thursday; and on the Friday, between midday and nones, there was the greatest eclipse that has ever been seen in the memory of those men who are alive now, and one could see full seven stars in the sky.22

James I dates his arrival in Montpellier a year after the conquest of Valencia, and one day before the great eclipse of 1239, which took place on Friday, June 3, and which appears in a great number of sources. The king was four months out with the month that was written in the Llibre dels fets, but he did correctly recall that he arrived on a Thursday and the eclipse occurred on a Friday.23 It seems to me that it cannot be said his memory was failing, because he remembered the day of the week and time of the eclipse and that it took place the day after his arrival in Montpellier.24 19  For this question Xavier Renedo, “Notes on the Speeches at the 1228 Corts in Barcelona to Debate the Conquest of Mallorca,” in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Preaching in the Mediterranean and Europe. Identities and Interfaith Encounters, ed. Linda G. Jones and Adrienne Dupont-Hamy (Turnhout, 2019), 227–50. 20  “E per tal que sàpia hom quan fo presa Valencia, fo la vespra de Sent Miquel e l’any de mccxxxix.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 234. 21  Petri Marsilii Opera Omnia, ed. Biosca, 258.

22  “E açò fo ·I· any aprés la presó de València. E entram en Montpestler el dijous; e·l divenres, entre mig jorn e hora nona fo eclipsis major que anch hom vis, de memòria d’aquels hòmens que ara són, e podia hom veer ·VII· esteles en lo cel.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 243. The detail that it was the greatest eclipse ever seen in that epoch makes sense, especially if we imagine it stated by James I right at the end of his life, many years later.

23  The Thalamus parvus of Montpellier describes the eclipse in the following terms: “In the year of 1339, on the first Friday of June, the sun disappeared between midday and mid afternoon” (En l’an ·m· e ·cc· e ·xxxviiii· lo primer divenres de jun, morí� lo solell entre miei dia et hora nona). Cited from Itinerari de Jaume I el Conqueridor, ed. Joaquim Miret i Sans (Barcelona, 2007), 140. 24  The eclipse must have reached its peak in Montpellier at 12:05 p.m: see further, Marí�a José Martí�nez Usó, Francisco J. Marco Castillo, Loli Ibáñez, “Oscurauit sol: Stone Engravings and Other



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Chrono­logical Jumps, Quotations, and Omissions

In an article from 1929, Ferran Soldevila argued that there was chrono­logical confusion and an error of memory between para­graphs 105–116 in the Llibre dels fets, corresponding to the king’s third stay on Mallorca (1232), and para­graphs 117–124, corresponding to his second visit (1231).25 Ferran Soldevila was right to detect a chrono­logical leap between these two narrative sequences, though I do not believe he was correct when he judged this an error from confusion in James’s memory. The best explanation for this jump was given by Josep Maria Pujol, who always argued that the Llibre dels fets does not contain slips, inaccuracies, or temporal confusions of any kind, but rather a coherent selection of episodes and scenes in line with a carefully prepared narrative programme. If James altered the chrono­logy it was, according to Pujol, for reasons related to the organization of the story. The king first talks about his third stay in Mallorcan lands26 because it allowed him to complete his account of the conquest, with the fading of the threat of attack from Tunisia, to recover the island and the capitulation of Xuaip, one of the Muslim rebel leaders sheltering in the mountains. The central theme of the second block,27 corresponding to the king’s second stay on Mallorca, really concerns the submission of Minorca. The Llibre dels fets then dedicates two para­graphs28 to the conquest of Ibiza, which took place in 1235. Each of these three narrative sequences on the conquest of the three islands shows a different role for the king. On Mallorca, James I was at the forefront of the conquest of the island and the fight against the Muslim rebels; on Minorca he took a back seat to Capdepera; and, on Ibiza, he delegated the initiative in the campaign to Guillem de Montgrí�, archbishop of Tarragona. Most of the Llibre dels fets respects the chrono­logical order, but sometimes this is altered if the unity of narrative sequences requires. That happens not only between para­graphs 105–116 and 117–124 but also with other narrative blocks. For example, para­graphs 138–152, dedicated to James I’s negotiations with Sancho VII of Navarre to make him his successor and lend him support in his conflict with the king of Castile, took place between February and April 1231.29 As Ferran Soldevila indicates in the notes to his edition, these events were prior to James’s second voyage to Mallorca and the conquest of Morella,30 but were narrated a posteriori.31 The technique of entrelacement, found not only in Arthurian novels but also in Villehardouin and Joinville, does not appear in the Llibre dels fets. Probably James I did not Contemporary Spanish Records for the a.d. 1239 and a.d. 1254 Eclipses and Their Astronomical Implications,” Journal of the History of Astronomy 47, no. 1 (2016): 67–75.

25  Ferran Soldevila, “La segona i la tercera estades de Jaume I a Mallorca,” in Orientacions i recer­ ques (Barcelona, 1929), 169–91. 26  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 112–21 (para­graphs 105–16). 27  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 121–26 (para­graphs 117–24). 28  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 126–28 (para­graphs 125–26). 29  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 135–46 (para­graphs 138–52). 30  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 131–35 (para­graphs 132–37).

31  Jaume I, Les quatre grans Cròniques: I. Llibre dels feits, ed. Soldevila, 229 n. 10).

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know how to apply this technique, but we cannot conclude that his memory failed him, because he frequently displayed extraordinary vitality. The same can be said of his rhetorical skill, when, as Josep Maria Pujol showed, he closes the episodes related to the end of the campaign on Mallorca and the conquests of Minorca and Ibiza with three very similar codes or closing formulae.32 Notwithstanding, there are incongruences to the story, perhaps more attributable to those responsible for writing out the clean copy of the reportationes than to the king having a bad memory. We are indebted to Josep Maria Pujol, the leading expert on the literary construction of the Llibre dels fets, for his detailed research into the citations and biblical references. The conclusions of his study are that James’s Latin and scriptural knowledge were far from that of a clergyman.33 Many references the king makes to the Bible are full of errors or confusions. Without wishing to cast doubts on Pujol’s acumen, I would like to make some observations on four Latin quotations that I hope will give a slightly better image, if not of his biblical knowledge, then at least of his memory. On one hand, it is true that the proverb “The night gives good counsel” (la nit ha consell), that James I attributed to Solomon,34 is an adage common to many European languages, but, on the other, we must not forget that this saying is of classical origin and well-known in medi­eval Latin literature, even becoming an emblem of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europe. Attributing the authorship of such a well-known Latin proverb to Solomon seems to me an easy error to make, especially for a king like James I.35 The attribution to the Scriptures of a verse from Ovid’s Ars amandi (II,13)36 at the start of a speech to the Aragonese parliament seems less serious to me: And we ordered the bishops and the nobles to our Cort and we had them assembled in the church of the Preachers. And we explained the matter to them, and we got to our feet and we began with an authority from the Sacred Scripture that says: Non minor est virtus quam querere parta tueri.37

As Ferran Soldevila noted many years ago, Marsili realized the quotation was not biblical, but rather Ovidian, and translated this passage, presenting it as a poeticum versum, while deforming the metric of the hexametric and having it say the opposite of its origi32  Josep Maria Pujol, “El programa narratiu del Llibre del rei en Jaume,” in El rei Jaume I. Fets, actes i paraules, ed. Germà Colón and Tomàs Martí�nez (Castelló de la Plana, 2008), 257–86 at 276. 33  Pujol, “¿Cultura eclesiàstica o competència retòrica?,” 167.

34  Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 139–40 (para­graph 145).

35  The most common Latin forms of this proverb, contained in Walther’s repertory (Hans Walther, Proverbia sententiaeque latinitatis Medii Aevi (Göttingen, 1963)), are Nox habet consilium or Nox dabit consilium. For its classical origins, see Renzo Tosi, “Permanenza di motivi proverbiali classici nelle culture moderne: alcuni esempi,” Classica. Revista brasileira de estudos clássicos, 17/18 (2005): 299. 36  Publius Ovidius Naso, Carmina amatoria, ed. Lucian Müller (Berlin, 1861), 33.

37  “E mandam nostra cort als bisbes e als richs hòmens, e faem-los ajustar a la església dels prehicadors. E mostram-los la paraula, e levam-nos en peus e començam ·I· auctoritat de la Escriptura que diu Non minor est virtus, quam querere, parta tueri.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 292.



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nal meaning.38 I do not consider James’s error as great as appears at first sight. In fact, I believe it is an error of the same kind as the one made with the proverb ”the night gives good counsel” (la nit ha consell). In effect, this was a verse sometimes cited as a sapiential authority. Aquinas, for example, who must have been well aware that the verse was by Ovid, quotes it at the start of his commentary on the epistle to the Ephesians, attributing it, given its sapiential nature, to a “wise man” (sicut dicit sapiens). James I, who was unaware that the verse was Ovid’s and perhaps did not even know it was a verse, attributed it to the Scriptures, supposing it must have come from the sapiential books. It is an understandable, and even excusable, error for someone like James I. The third biblical reference I wish to mention dates from the end of 1264 or early in 1265 in the church of Santa Maria in Calatayud, at the start of a speech James gave to the Aragonese nobility. According to the Llibre dels fets, the church was full: “And there were more than a thousand men there to listen to the discussions.”39 Such an extraordinary gathering of people was due firstly to the unanimous opposition of the Aragonese nobility to paying the bovatge (a tax on livestock, especially on oxen) the king demanded they pay for the campaign to conquer Murcia, and, secondly, to the nobility’s complaints about continuous violations of the furs, their local laws. The debate and discussions were fierce and ended with a speech by the king that began as follows: Worthy men, it seems to me that you wish to act as the Jews acted towards Our Lord, when on the night of Thursday, at the Supper, they seized Him and brought Him before Pilate to judge him, and they cried out “Crucify, crucify!” So, you say that I have broken the fueros, but you do not say in what and in what not, and as you do not wish to receive justice from me, it is the most novel complaint and argument that anyone has ever made against his lord.40

The skilful comparison of James’s defencelessness before a nobility that continually complained but, at least according to the Llibre dels fets, never supported their claims with a solid legal basis, and Jesus before the Pharisees and Pontius Pilate recall the famous Collegerunt pontifices et pharisei epistle by Pier delle Vigne. In April 1239, Frederick II sent this letter to all the kings of Europe to defend himself against the attacks by the pope and the Roman curia.41 38  “All the Aragonese being gathered in the parliament of Zaragoza, in the church of the friar preachers, the king stood up and, standing, spoke this poetic verse: Non minor est virtus querere quam parta tueri” (Congregatis omnibus Aragonensibus, ad curiam Cesarauguste in ecclesia fratrum Predicatorum, surrexit rex, et stans assumpsit illum poeticum versum: Non minor est virtus querere quam parta tueri). Cited from Petri Marsilii Opera Omnia, ed. Biosca, 328. For the observation by Ferran Soldevila: Jaume I, Les quatre grans Cròniques: I. Llibre dels feits, ed. Soldevila, 410 n. 1974). 39  “havia-y pus de ·M· hòmens que escoltaven les paraules.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 298. 40  “Barons, vosaltres me sembla que volets usar de la manera que feÿen los juheus a nostre Seyor quant lo preseren lo dijous a nuyt, a la Cena, e l’aduxeren denant Pilat, que·l jutjàs, que cridaven: Crucifige, crucifige! E que vós digats que us desafur, e no en què ni en què no, e que vuylats pendre dret de mi, aquesta és la pus novel·la demanda e raó que anch moguessen hòmens contra lur seyor.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 299. 41  For the context and sense of this letter, see David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medi­eval Emperor (London, 1988), 318–19.

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The Pontiffs and Pharisees gathered in a council and allied themselves against the prince and the emperor of the Romans. “What shall we do?” they said, “If that man triumphs over his enemies, If we let him go free he will subject all the glory of the Lombards to himself, and like the Caesars will not take long for him to seize our position from us and destroy our people. […] Sitting in the chair of Moses, now the Pharisees have risen wrongly against the prince of the Romans and, at the same time being responsible for the wrong and the judges, they have openly subverted justice.42

Frederick II compared himself with Christ and his accusers with the Pharisees plotting against the Messiah. There are no other points in common between Pier delle Vigne’s letter and the discourse by James I, so it cannot be claimed with certainty that there was a relation of cause and effect. However, James’s tenacious memory could have recalled, twenty-five years later, Frederick II’s letter and his natural wit could have known how to recycle the comparison by Pier delle Vigne in another context. Finally, there is one last detail about the natural memory of the author of the Llibre dels fets I would like to comment on. This is a series of passages in which James claims not to recall the names of the people he mentions, where he uses formulae of the style “whose name we do not remember” (de qui no·ns membra lo nom).43 Just seventeen such passages exist, a tiny number in comparison with the many proper names that appear in the book. According to Josep Maria Pujol, these were “failed orientations [...] and recognized memory failures, which are usual around oral interaction.”44 Without denying that there could be gaps in the king’s memory, especially when he talks about events from his infancy, which took place long before the original oral tale of the Llibre dels fets was conceived, Pujol subtly showed that this was a typical resort in oral discourse that “reinforces indirectly the veracity of the existence of the person [...] and, therefore, of the whole scene.”45 So, what we have here is a skilfully used rhetorical device, one I sometimes believe could also be used to close a list of names that could have been too long: And we went to the meeting vested in our purpoints and with swords girt and with us were Ramon Folc, Guillem de Cardona, Don Ató Foces, Don Rodrigo Lizana, Don Ladrón […] Don Assalit de Gúdar, one of our knights, and Don Pelegrí�n de Bolas. And on their side came Don Ferdinand, who was our uncle, and Guillem de Montcada, father of Gastó,

42  “Collegerunt pontifices et pharisei consilium in unum, et adversus principem et Romanorum imperatorem convenerunt. “Quid facimus?—inquiunt—; quia hic homo de hostibus sic triumphat, si sic ipsum dimittimus, omnem sibi subjiciet gloriam Lombardorum, et more cesareo veniens non tardabit, ut posse nobis et locum auferat, et destruat gentem nostram” […] Super cathedra Mosi sedentes hoc tempore pharisei sic moti sunt contra romanum principem oberrantes, quod actores malicie facti simul et judices, aperte judicium subverterunt.” Cited from Historia diplomatica Friderici secundi. Tomus V. Pars I, ed. Jean Louis Alphonse Huillard-Bréholles and Honoré de Albertis de Luynes (Paris, 1857), 308. 43  “De qui no·ns membra lo nom.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 322.

44  “Orientacions fallides [...] falles de memòria reconegudes, tí�piques de la interacció oral.” Cited from Josep Maria Pujol, “Composició oral interactiva en el Llibre dels feits: el testimoni de la retòrica,” in Jaume I. Commemoració del viii centenari del naixement de Jaume I, Volum I, ed. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol (Barcelona, 2011), 741–59 at 752.

45  “Reforça de contracop la veracitat de l’existència de la persona [...] i, doncs, de l’escena en el seu conjunt.” Cited from Pujol, “Composició oral interactiva,” 752.



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Don Pedro Cornel, and Don Fernando Pérez de Pina, and others of their party whom we do not recall.46

If we bear in mind that of the seventeen times this formula was used, thirteen date from before the conquest of the city of Valencia, which took place in late September 1238, the conclusion arises that in most of these cases there must have been a gap in his memory, because the king was referring to events some forty years later. But, we should bear in mind that in the majority of times this formula is used, it refers to knights, clergy, or members from the second order of the king’s entourage, not people from the first rank. One clear example of a gap in memory is evident at the start of the book when the king refers to the second marriage of his grandfather, William of Montpellier, after he separated from Princess Eudocia, his maternal grandmother, and he is unable to recall the lineage of the new wife. And then, she still being alive, William of Montpellier took another wife, who was from Castile, the father of whose name we do not recall, just hers, Lady Agnes.47

The wedding of William of Montpellier and Lady Agnes took place in Barcelona on May 6, 1187, almost ninety years before the oral origin of the Llibre dels fets.48 No surprise that, so long after the event, the king’s memory failed and he did not remember the lineage of his maternal grandfather’s second wife. On the contrary, the Llibre dels fets is a magnificent example of the good state of the natural memory of a king who, at the “end of his days” (darreria dels seus dies), as he himself states in the first para­graph, reviewed his life and prepared himself for a good death. As Pujol stated, ““what else is the writing of King James’ book but a preparation for a good death?”49 In the Middle Ages, preparing for a good death could only be done with the help of one’s natural memory.

Francesc Eiximenis and Memory as a “Book of Understanding”

With Eiximenis we move from the courts, camps, and palaces of James I to the libraries, pulpits, and universities; we also go from the thirteenth to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and from the natural memory to the artificial, heavily influenced by written culture and the world of books. But, as an encyclopaedist, Eiximenis talks about both 46  “E exim a les vistes, nostres perpunts vestits e les espaes cintes, e vench ab nós En Ramon Folch, e En Guillem de Cardona, e don Ató de Foces, e don Rodrigo Liçana e don Ladró […] e don Assalit de Gúdar, e ·I· cavaller nostre e don Pelegrí� de Bolas. E de la lur part vench Don Ferrando, que era oncle nostre, e En Guillem de Muntcada, pare d’En Gastó, e Don Pero Corneyl, e Fferrando Pèriç de Pina e d’altres qui eren de la lur part, que a nós no menbren.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 42. 47  “E puys En Guillem de Montpestler, estant ella viva, pres ·I· altra dona, que era de Castella—de què no·ns membra el nom del pare d’aquela dona, mas ella avia nom Dona Agnès.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 9.

48  Vincent Challet, “The ‘Petit Thalamus’ of Montpellier. Moving Mirror of an Urban Political Identity,” Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum 10 (2016): 215–29 at 221. 49  “¿quina altra cosa és la redacció del llibre del rei En Jaume sinó una preparació per a ben morir?” Cited from Pujol, “El programa narratiu del Llibre del rei En Jaume,” 260.

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natural memory and the artificial memory. Natural memory is only mentioned to readers of the Terç del Crestià, an encyclopaedic treatise of 1,058 chapters dedicated to sins, to explain the good and bad use that can be made of it. In chapter 683 of this work, in the section dedicated to the sin of pride, Eiximenis criticizes those Christians who publicly boast about the natural gifts of the soul, like the subtlety and sharpness of understanding or a good memory to recall the past. The following chapter is entirely dedicated to criticizing this sin of pride and, especially, to recalling the role memory has as the fundamental reference point for making decisions based on experiences and lessons from the past. (For Eiximenis, these experiences include not only what has been lived, but also all knowledge learnt through books, classes, or sermons.) The second natural gift of the soul is to have a good memory to remember the past. That is a great gift of God, which is granted to man to give him confidence in the things to do in the future, to save himself from harm and to make him used to doing good. That is why the memory is called the book of understanding, because in the understanding, as if it were a book, very profitable things are read. But since few people can immediately remember many things at the same time, some fools become proud of this gift of God. As a result of this great evil, God does not allow them to remember themselves when they are still in time.50

A good (natural) memory was a precious divine gift that allowed one to choose the correct path or reject the incorrect. (In this sense Eiximenis used the lovely metaphor of the memory as a book of understanding, one that recalls the beginning of Dante’s Vita nuova: “in quella parte del libro de la mia memoria.”) Boasting about a good memory was, for Eiximenis, a serious error, because it implied perversion of the role the memory played as a moral guide. As Eiximenis mentioned while commenting on a sentence attributed to Augustine of Hippo, the punishment reserved by divine providence for those who committed this sin was to forget about themselves when they died and, therefore, find eternal condemnation for cheating themselves out of a ”good death” (bona mort). And this is what St. Augustine says, thus: “Hac animadversione peccator punitive ut qui vivens immemor fuit Dei quod et moriens obliviscatur sui.” And that means that our Lord God will judge he who during this life forgets him and his commandments, does not remember him at the time of death and, therefore, dies without having prepared himself and arriving defenceless before God so that God may condemn him for his lack of concern and forgetfulness.51

50  “Lo II do natural de la ànima és haver bona memòria a remembrar lo passat. E açò és gran do de Déu, car és dat a l’hom per ençertir si matex en les coses faedores en temps vinent, per guardarse de mal e per exercitar-se en bé. E, per tal, la memòria és appellada libre de l’enteniment, car aquí� lig lo nostre enteniment moltes coses a ell profitoses axí� com en un libre. Emperò, per tal cant moltes coses remembrar promptament és cosa que pochs han, per tal alscuns folls se erguyllen d’aquest do de Déu, per raó de la qual malvestat permet Déus que no·ls membra de si matexos en aquesta vida dementre que és ora.” From Barcelona, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona, MS 91, fol. 299r.

51  “E açò diu sent Augustí� dient axí�: Hac animadversione peccator punitive ut qui vivens immemor fuit Dei quod et moriens obliviscatur sui. E vol dir axí�: Que nostre Senyor Déu vol que aquesta sia la sentència d’aquell qui oblida en esta vida a Ell e als seus manaments, ço és que en la mort no li



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Written over a hundred years after the conception of James I’s book, these words by Eiximenis seem to me the best comment that can be made on the (good) use of the natural memory in the Llibre dels fets. Indeed, the king did not flaunt his memory before the members of the court, but used it to review his life, examine his conscience, and prepare for a good death. That is why the first para­graph of the book is saturated, from first to last, with the joy the king felt when, finding himself approaching death’s door, he had lived the high and low points of every Christian, but was ready to die well. The first para­graph ends with these words: We have written this book from memory, and in order for men to know each other and know how we have spent this mortal life, that is, how we have done things, with the help of the all-powerful Lord, who is the true God and Trinity. We have done so for those who want to hear the thanks God has given us and in order to set an example for all other men in the world who do what we have done, that is to say, put their faith in this lord who is all powerful.52

In “his later years” (darreria dels seus ayns) James I told the Llibre dels fets with the help of his natural memory as an examination of conscience, wanting to leave written testimony to serve as a “book of understanding” (llibre de l’enteniment) for his ideal readers, who we have to suppose, as Josep Maria Pujol did, were members of the royal household: in other words, his descendants.53 In Eiximenis’ eyes, James I could not have made better use of his natural memory to prepare, as was said in the Middle Ages, a “good death,” while at the same time enlightening his descendants in the practice of good governance with his example and experience. In chapter 684 of the Terç del Crestià, after talking about the good and bad uses of “natural memory,” Eiximenis refers to a “special art” to strengthen memory that he provides in the pro­logue to the first volume of his Sunday sermons. He is obviously referring to his Ars praedicandi populo, the introduction to a collection of sermons constructed according to precepts defended by Eiximenis. An important part of this technique concerned rules “so those who have to preach could remember the things they have to say without much difficulty, and also to help other men in the world, who often have a poor memory.”54 These rules were aimed mainly at preachers, but without excluding lay membre de si matex e muyra sens tota providència de si matex et vinga sens tota preparació davant Déu per tal que Déus lo dampne per son descurament e per la sua mala oblivió.” From Barcelona, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona, MS 91, fol. 299r.

52  “E per tal que·ls hòmens coneguessin e sabessin, can haurí�em passada aquesta vida mortal, ço que Nós haurí�em feyt ajudan-nos lo Seyor poderós, en qui és vera Trinitat, lexam aquest libre per memòria. E aquels qui volran hoir de les gràcies que nostre Seyor nos ha feytes e per dar exempli a tots los altres hòmens del món que facen ço que Nós havem feyt de metre sa fe en aquest seyor qui és tan poderós.” Cited from Jaume I, Llibre dels fets, 7. 53  Josep Maria Pujol, “The Llibre del rei En Jaume: A Matter of Style,” in Historical Literature in Medi­eval Iberia, ed. Alan Deyermond (London, 1996), 35–65 at 35–37.

54  “per tal que aquells qui han a preÿcar, sens gran difficultat poguessen remembrar les coses que han a dir, e axí� matex per ajudar-ne als altres hòmens del món qui comunament són nafrats en la memòria.” From Barcelona, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona, MS 91, fol. 299r.

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people who could also benefit. (The Ars praedicandi populo was addressed to preachers, but did not exclude students of canon or civil law, and it is probable that Eiximenis also believed they could be useful for leading citizens with responsibilities for governing municipalities.)55 However, after this reference to the rules of artificial memory, Eiximenis insists in the Terç that the main function of the memory was not to help, whether reinforced or not with the support of a special art, to record the parts of a discourse, but to concentrate on the great foundations and principles of Christianity. And specifically the ancient Fathers taught us to remember often what God has forced us to do through his law, as well as the many general and individual gifts that we have received by Him, so that we often thank Him. This way we have more chances to escape the last judgement, in which God will interrogate us on all these things. They also taught us that when we know how to use memory this way, to teach it to those who do not know how to use it, to teach it to those who do not use it, so we never forgot to thank God for this great gift and for other greater ones. Also, thanks to this great gift we improve continuously and never become proud of ourselves, as do the foolish men of whom we have spoken before.56

This passage from the Terç del Crestià seems like a translation into medi­eval Catalan of the wise words of Frances Yates in her great book on the tradition of the art of the memory. “What were the things which the pious Middle Ages wished chiefly to remember? Surely they were the things belonging to salvation or damnation, the articles of the faith, the roads to heaven through virtues and to hell through vices.”57 In other words, memory, the art of the memory, as an ancilla theo­logiae or, better said, as an ancilla salvationis or christianae religionis. In fact, Eiximenis’ vast written work, from the great encyclopaedia of the Crestià to the Vita Christi, passing through the Llibre de les dones or the Llibre dels àngels, was nothing other than an enormous effort to make his readers remember and understand the great “general and individual” benefits they received as Christians and to remember the foundations of Christianity.

55  According to Eiximenis, a good part of his advice was useful for students of the decretals or of the code of civil law (Martí� de Barcelona, “L’Ars Praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 12 (1936): 301–40 at 329). In chapter 49 of the Dotzè (Francesc Eiximenis, Dotzè llibre del Crestià. Primera part, volum primer, ed. Xavier Renedo (Girona, 2005), 106–8), his first great political encyclopaedia, Eiximenis offers the readers a series of basic rules, not including the art of memory, about speaking well in councils and political assemblies.

56  E singularment nos ensenyaren los pares passats de remembrar sovín ço a què Déus nos ha obligats de fer per sa ley e los benifets generals et personals que tants havem reebuts d’Ell per tal que li·n fahéssem sovín gràcies e que axí poguéssem escapar mils al juý final en lo qual sobre aquestes coses serem estretament demanats per Déu. E·ns ensenyaren que cant sabrem axí remembrar, que u ensenyem a aquells qui no u saben per tal que·ns membre tostemps fer a Déu gràcies d’aquest tan gran do e dels altres majors e, per tal, encara, que per occasió d’aquest tan gran don nos millorem tostemps e jamés no·ns en erguyllem, axí com fan los hòmens folls dels quals havem damunt parlat. From Barcelona, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona, MS 91, fol. 299r–v. 57  Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1999), 55.



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Eiximenis, Similitudines, and the Use of Images

Let us return to the presentation of the artificial memory offered in the Ars praedicandi populo.58 As was well- known at least since Cicero’s De oratore (II, 86–88),59 the art of the memory could be presented as a mental alphabet that played with two elements: images, that could take the role of the letters, and places (loci), or spaces, where the images had to be placed, equivalent to the paper or parchment. Eiximenis, when creating places for the memory, advised starting from well-known cities, streets, churches, or houses. (Indeed, it seems he dispensed with imaginary cities or buildings, as had been done in the classical and medi­eval tradition.) The examples Eiximenis recommended as places for the memory were houses, streets, or churches, but also maps of Europe, where one could follow the pilgrim route to Santiago between Rome and Galicia, passing through Florence, Avignon, Barcelona, or Toledo, or even a map of the universe, from the empyrean to the centre of the earth. He employed places known from passing them, or praying there, perhaps daily, or of places studied in the schools in books or paintings. Moreover, the places for the memory had to be situated, as the classical tradition required, “at a reasonable distance” (ad competentem distanciam) from each other and must be distinct to avoid confusion.60 This series of places was the mental support on which images of the memory had to be set. Eiximenis recommended there should be a relation of affinity between the places and the similitudes or images of memory. For example, the altars and chapels of a church built in the memory of the preacher could be filled with the various parts of a sermon. If one were to talk about the Trinity, the image for this in the memory could be placed on the high altar, because, according to Eiximenis, the Trinity is above all else; if one had to talk about purity, the corresponding image could be situated on the altar to the Mother of God. If the subject was contemplation, the image to recall it could be placed on the altar dedicated to St. John.61 Both the relation of affinity between places and images and the order that gave coherence to the thread of the discourse thus memorized were equally important. A well-organized chain of places and images—whether villages spread over a map or the spheres of the universe, or the chapels and altars of a church—was a guarantee of mnemonic solidity. Perhaps this is why he insisted on the places of the memory being based on reality. The similitudines or images of the memory were the icons to be fitted into the series of loci to recall everything needing to be said. Eiximenis begins by making the classical distinction between the “memory of events” (memoria rerum) and that “of words” 58  Kimberly A. Rivers offers an excellent introduction and analysis of this work in Rivers, Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice. Memory, Images, and Preaching in the Later Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2010), 149–50, 161–79, 236–7. 59  Cicero, De oratore, ed. Karl Wilhelm Piderit (Leipzig, 1862), 214–18.

60  Barcelona, “L’Ars praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” 325 and 327. The cities on the map that connected Rome and Santiago also had to be equidistant. Each of these cities, on the other hand, had to have a different visual depiction, because Rome had to be full of clergy; Toledo, knights; Florence, money; and Barcelona, large buildings and great walls. 61  Barcelona, “L’Ars praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” 328.

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(memoria verborum) and centred his discourse on the memoria rerum, because a single image was enough to recall a long story. In contrast, to remember many words, a large number of images was necessary.62 Regarding the “images of memory,” we need to be termino­logically precise. In the Ars praedicandi populo, Eiximenis only twice used the word “image,” a term that tended to be used in the arts of the classical memory, and, in contrast, he used the terms “similitude” seven times and “figure” twice. Clearly, for Eiximenis, “similitude” was more adequate than “image.” This is not a question about preferring one word or another, because I believe that “similitude” and “figure” were not synonymous for Eiximenis. In the only passage in which he used the word “image” twice, Eiximenis very clearly advised against its use, even though the term was sanctioned by authors of the classical tradition as prestigious as Cicero: Note that Tully and many others, wishing to aid memory artificially, said that images of memorable things ought to be made and commended to the aforesaid places. However, because he has a long tract about the difficulty and great effort of remembering brought about by the images of things located in the places, the moderns of this time do not approve that method, but, considering more effective and easier that method which we just set forth, they direct themselves to it, passing over the ancient method. For this reason, I took care to speak only about this new mode.63

The passage cited above is near the end of the section on memory in the Ars praedicandi. In the initial part, Eiximenis recorded in detail the termino­logy for the art of the artificial memory. To refer to places, Eiximenis used the classical term locus. At the same time, to refer to what tended to be known in classical rhetoric as imagines agentes, he only talks about “similitudes” or “figures.” The imagines memorabilium of the passage cited above—situated, it should be kept in mind, at the end of the chapter on artificial memory—correspond to the imagines agentes mentioned by Cicero and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Despite everything, Eiximenis advised against their use, basing this on the authority of the moderns. According to the Ars praedicandi populo, the imagines agentes belong to the art of the memory of the past, because modern theorists of preaching opted to replace them with similitudines, which are easier to use.

62  On the distinction, present in both Cicero and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, between memoria rerum and memoria verborum, see Yates, The Art of Memory, 8–9. Despite focusing on the former, Eiximenis dedicated one of the rules of his mini-treatise on memory to teach how to recall the name of the apostles, placing images that evoked them in a well-known street, or if one needed to recall a series of proper names, reducing each term to a syllable and forming a word with each of the syllables. Barcelona, “L’Ars praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” 329.

63  “Nota quod Tullius et multi alii, uolentes iuuare artificialiter memoriam, inuenerunt super locis predictis deberi fingi imagines memorabilium et commendare eas locis. Tamen quia hic habet longum tractatum de difficultate atque magnitudine in recordacione quia imaginum sic rerum collocatarum in eis, ideo modum istum non approbant moderni huius temporis sed, magis expeditum et facilem estimantes illum quem statim diximus et premissimus, ad istum se conuertunt, antiquo pretermisso. Ideo de isto premisso nouo modo solum curaui hic loqui.” Cited from Barcelona, “L’Ars praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” 329. English translation by Kimberley Rivers in Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds., The Medi­eval Craft of Memory: An Antho­logy of Texts and Pictures (Philadephia, 2002), 202.



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The moderni Eiximenis talks about were both the authors of the so-called sermo modernus, in other words the scholastic sermon, typically preachers from the mendicant orders who followed the directives in the artes praedicandi. One of these moderni, who Eiximenis could not have known, was the Franciscan Géraud de Pescher. In his Ars faciendi sermones, his recommendation was almost the same as in the Ars praedicandi populo, but in other words and another tone. Pescher, who, like Eiximenis, talks about similitudes, not images, criticized preachers who built fantastic cities or castles in their memories instead of similitudes based on the biblical passages on which their sermons were built: One cannot ignore that some preachers, basing themselves excessively on their fantasy, build imaginary cities and castles, with towers, gates, and everything required, and arm warriors with shields, helmets, lances, and also swords and armour. They do all that moralizing for themselves, without basing anything on the Holy Scriptures, building fantastic similitudes, as if the Holy Scriptures accepted that kind of game. Preachers who do so humiliate the Scriptures and disfigure and destroy the holy doctrine.64

Eiximenis, who was undoubtedly a modern preacher, thought like Pescher and must have applied these norms in his sermons. Two other modern preachers did the same: the Dominican Vicent Ferrer, as we shall see at the end of this article, and the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena.65 The only difference between the approach in Eiximenis’ Ars praedicandi and Pescher’s Ars faciendi sermones is that Eiximenis defended the modern line because it was easier to learn and apply than the old one, while Pescher criticized fantastic imagines agentes because they were not built from the Bible. Eiximenis’ point of view does not contradict Pescher’s. If we compare the speculations about the imagines agentes in Cicero’s De oratore and the Rhetorica ad Herennium with the similitudines of the memory Eiximenis cited as examples, there is a great distance between one them. Both Cicero and the anonymous author of the Rhetorica demanded that the imagines agentes should be surprising and extreme, unusual and impressive, because “ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and novel stay longer in mind.”66 The similitudes cited by Eiximenis are far from fulfilling these requisites: the cross to represent the passion of Christ; a boat or net to recall the name of the apostle Andrew, a well-known fisherman, or the image of 64  “Istud autem non est pretemictendum quod aliqui sue fantasie insistentes predicantes, civitates et castella edificant cum turribus et portis et aliis fingentes, et armant milites cum scuto, galea, lancea, ense quoque et lorica, et hec per seipsos moraliçando et nihil per Sacram Scripturam probando, faciendo similitudines suas adinventas ac si Sacra Scriptura curatur similitudinibus aprobatis. Tales enim divine Scripture derogant et sacram doctrinam destruunt et confundunt.” Cited from Ferdinand Marie Delorme, “L’Ars faciendi sermones de Géraud du Pescher,” Antonianum 19 (1944): 180–98 at 186.

65  See further on this question Carlo Delcorno, “L’ars praedicandi di Bernardino da Siena,” Lettere Italiane 32 (1980): 441–75 at 464–65.

66  “Usitatae res facile e memoria elabuntur, insignes et novae diutius manent in animo.” Cited from Cicero, Rhetorica ad C. Herennium. De ratione dicendi, ed. Harry Caplan (London, 1964), 218 (book III, 22).

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a king with a spear to evoke a victory in a certain war.67 In the same line, on the map of memory of the route to Santiago, Eiximenis proposed placing an icon that represented the bridge of St. Benezet in Avignon, or oil to represent Zaragoza, because it was one of the main producers of oil.68 Perhaps the most surprising and unusual images proposed by Eiximenis were of two people kissing each other to recall the name of the apostle Paul, “who is signified through the kiss of peace which the two people kissing represent,” or the image of the great lamb (agnus) to evoke the apostle Andrew, “because both of these words begin with the same letter.”69 Images of tax collectors as the belly of the public body, civil servants as its ears, wise men as its eyes, and the king as the head are similarly surprising, but only to a certain extent. The image of the human body as a mystic body of society was widespread and because, in the end, the two men kissing each other are doing so as a sign of peace and friendship. In the art of preaching like Eiximenis’, the aim was typically to remember concepts, facts, and devout characters by using churches or pilgrimage routes like the route to Santiago as loci for the memory. This purpose favoured metonymic images rather than surprising or awe-inspiring ones. Eiximenis did not detail which images should be used to evoke the Trinity, purity, or contemplation, but by placing these images in the chapels of a church implied the use of metonymic images such as an anchor, or mere similitudes. In fact, Eiximenis’s proposal was nothing new, because, as Frances Yates points out, Aquinas had reduced the imagines agentes of the classical artificial memory to devotional corporal similitudes on the pages of the Summa teo­logica which discussed memory.70

Two Images of Memory

Among the sermons by Eiximenis that accompany the Ars praedicandi populo, there must have been a good antho­logy of places and images, or similitudes, of memory. But until these sermons reappear, we have to make do with the chapter from the Ars dedicated to explaining the rules of artificial memory and a pair of images of memory in the Terç and Dotzè del Crestià. In the latter case, I write images, not similitudes, of the memory consciously, because these are unusual and surprising images, not mere similitudes, and also because Eiximenis calls them so in both the Terç and the Dotzè del Crestià.

67  Barcelona, “L’Ars praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” 326. In his Institutio Oratoria (XI, 2) Quintilian recommended using the anchor as an image of navigation, and an arm as an image of war: “However, let us suppose that the symbol is drawn from navigation, as, for example, an anchor or from warfare, as, for example, some weapon” (sit autem signum navigationis ut ancora, militiae ut aliquid ex armis). Cited from Quintilian, The Institutio Oratorial of Quintilian, ed. Harold Edgeworth Butler, vols. 4 (Cam­bridge, 1968), 4:222. 68  Barcelona, “L’Ars praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” 327.

69  “Qui significatur per pacem quam tibi representant illi duo se osculantes […] quia ista dua vocabula incipiunt ab eadem sillaba. Cited from Barcelona, “L’Ars praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” 325. English translation by Kimberley Rivers in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medi­ eval Craft of Memory, 198. 70  Yates, The Art of Memory, 75–77.



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The image of memory in the Terç del Crestià appears in chapter 348, in the middle of a section dedicated to the sin of drunkenness (chaps. 344–353). This is an image of memory with classicizing echoes which depicts the negative consequences of drunkenness allegorically. Eiximenis first calls it a “figure,” but then changes this to an “image,” as does his source, the Postilla in librum Sapientiae Salomonis by the English Dominican Robert Holcot.71 In ancient times, poets depicted drunkenness this way, in other words as the image of a child who played a horn and wore a glass crown on its head. This is how they let it be understood that the drunk, like a small child, has no understanding; and plays the horn in front of everyone, revealing everything he does and without knowing what the others are doing; and wearing a glass crown on his head, because the drunk praises himself and thinks he is a great person, but his crown is glass, because if it is eaten, it kills, and, if touched with hands, it injures them, and if intact, it is dangerous. This way drunkenness led the man to death, shortened his days, and damaged his reputation. That is why a notorious drunk is, by law, infamous; he cannot act as a witness in a trial and is the infamy and shame for all his lineage.72

The claim that the image of drunkenness the Terç offers had been depicted antigament also comes from Holcot. (The only detail Eiximenis adds is that it had been depicted thus by poets.)73 In fact, Eiximenis faithfully follows Holcot in both the composition of the image and the moral comment on its three central elements: youth, the horn, and the crown of glass. Someone imagined that the image of drunkenness had been painted like this: the image of a child, who had a horn in his hand and a glass crown on his head. He was a child as a sign that drunkenness makes men insensitive and without language, like children. He had a horn as a sign that he was incapable of keeping a secret, but reveals them shouting and yelling. He had a glass crown, because the drunk, even if he has nothing, thinks himself glorious and rich.74

71  On the tradition of mnemonic images (or exempla) and the main mendicant authors, see the well-documented analysis in Rivers, Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice, 209–82.

72  “Antigament embriaguea era pintada per los poetes en aytal figura, ço és ymatge d’infant qui trompava ab un corn e estava ab corona de vidre al cap, donant per açò a entendre que l’embriach és sens enteniment axí� com un poch infant; e trompa a tot hom, e revela tot ço que fa, ne sap què fan los altres; e porta al cap corona de vidre, car l’embriach cuyda prear si mateix e ésser un gran hom, emperò la sua corona és vidre, qui menjat alciu, e tractat ab les mans naffra-les, e sancer és perillós. Axí� embriaguea porta l’om a la mort, e li cuyta sos dies, e naffra la sua fama, en tant que famós embriach és infamis de dret, ne pot fer testimoni en juhí�, e és a infàmia e vergonya a tota sa natura.” Cited from Francesc Eiximenis, Com usar bé de beure e menjar. Normes morals contingudes en el “Terç del Crestià,” ed. Jorge E. Gracia (Barcelona, 1977), 30.

73  Both Holcot and John Ridevall, a fourteenth-century Franciscan friar, who, as we shall see below, also dedicated himself to collecting images of this type, present their texts as descriptions of painting, although, as Fritz Saxl stated, it does not seem that there were any images behind their texts. Indeed, up to a point, Eiximenis is right when he indicates the image was painted by poets with rhetorical colours. Fritz Saxl, “A Spiritual Encyclopaedia of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 82–142 at 102. 74  “Fingitur a quodam ebrietatis imaginem sic fuisse depictam, imago puerilis, cornu habens in manu et in capite coronam de vitreo. Puer erat in signum quod facit hominem elinguem et

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The images in Holcot and Eiximenis are very similar. If we change the glass crown for one of vine leaves, and one horn for another, the two images have many points in common with the emblem xxv of Alciat, titled In statuam Bacchi. The detail of the crown of glass instead of a crown, or a garland of vine leaves or ivy, reappears in the Summa de exemplis et rerum similitudinibus [IV,3] by Dominican Giovanni da San Gimignano, who depicts Bacchus in these terms: “It is said that Bacchus had horns and wore a glass crown on his head.”75 While the image of Bacchus is secondary in the Terç, the same cannot be said for the image of friendship in the Dotzè del Crestià, which occupies a whole chapter, and so plays a much more relevant role. The image is dealt with in chapter 807, at the end of a small treatise dedicated to friendship (chaps. 800–807), that Eiximenis presents as the eighth element of the res publica, understood as a natural bond (colligatio naturalis). In this sense, the image and his comment are a kind of recapitulation of the previous seven chapters. I translate it here in full: “What does friendship represent in the form of an image?” Hrabanus, De naturis rerum, represents friendship with the following image: a young man dressed in green, with his heart open and wounded, who had a booklet in his hands where one could read: “Life and Death, Far and Near, in the Summer and in the Winter.” In view of this, poet Lucius Lucanus said that the friend has to appear young before the beloved, that is to say he must be attentive to him, must share his ills, and his presence has to be a motive for great happiness, as Aristotle says, Nicomachean Ethics, book 8, chaps. 6 and 9. He then says that he is dressed in green, a firm colour that is restful for the sight; it is found in precious stones; it is made from a solid mixture of colours and means loyalty, a quality that, above all the others, a friend must have. What Jeremiah said is true: “Omnis amicos fraudulenter incedit” (9:4); that is why he also said: “Maledictus qui confidit in homine quia omnis amicus subplantavit me” (17:5), in other words, that all friendship is false and so he says that damned is he who trusts in the man and places his hopes in him, as everyone deceives the ones close to them. Job says that this type of men has no pity on the friend he really loves, but they do not love him, although Job said: “Qui tollit ab amico misericordiam timorem Domini dereliquit” (6:14), in other words, he who shows no mercy on his friend or who does not help him loyally has no fear of God, and is very cruel to those he loves by denying them the love they deserve. On this Valerius Maximus explains marvellous stories in the fourth book, in the chapter De amicicia, where he relates that after Mark Anthony beheaded Lucillus, who had consented to the death of Julius Caesar, Nolinus, companion of the deceased, asked Mark Anthony to behead him, as he had no wish to continue living after the death of his beloved friend. And he explains that Nolinus picked up Lucillus’ head and kissed and embraced it saying, “I give many thanks to God because as in life we were united by a great friendship so in death we shall be buried for ever in the same place (and then he was decapitated).

insentatum, more pueri. Cornu habebat in manu in signum quod nullum celat secretum, sed clamando et clangendo revelat. Coronam habebat vitream, quia reputat se gloriosum et divitem, quia est ebriosus, cum nichil habeat.” Cited from Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), 171.

75  “Ferturque cornutus et corona vitrea coronatus.” Cited from Giovanni da San Gimignano, Summa de exemplis et rerum similitudinibus locupletissima (Lyon, 1585), 281r.



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Thirdly, he says he has an open and wounded heart. Open because you can trust everything to the beloved friend, as Seneca says, Ad Lucillum, book 1 (I, 3). Wounded because, only by knowing of the tribulations of the friend, he will feel them as if they were his own, and he will seek the best solutions he can with no need to say anything to him: it is enough that he knows it. Fourthly, it is written in his booklet “Life and Death,” as the beloved friend for him is life. Ecclesiasticus 27: “In bonis amici decorabitur” (Prov. 27:9), in other words that the soul of man is sweetened and rejuvenated on seeing the nobility and goodness of his beloved. And they being so close, the friend’s death is just as if it meant death to the beloved—as St. Augustine explains in his Confessions. The fifth point corresponds to the words Far and Near written in the booklet, meaning that the good friend has to be loyal both from afar and from close by. Damned be the friend who, once dead or absent, has no friends or relatives. Carpophorus, in the Dietario, says that all the ladies of Libya have four lovers, apart from their husbands, as they said that, for them, love was life and that is why they always wanted love to be present around, and as their husbands were often away, they needed to find love in someone else who was there and, so, one of their lovers always had to be near them, in the city. And they said they did not love any man, but only the presence of love, just like someone who wants to eat meat but takes no care of the plate; but, since meat always has to be presented on a plate, they need one. In the same way that these ladies said that they did not love men, but rather the presence of love in men, and as love can only be shown through a man, that is why they wanted lovers with whom to enjoy the presence of love. According to Carpophorus, these words were very malicious, but, as the husbands tolerated them, we should devote more to speaking against them than against the ladies. The sixth point was “In the Summer and in the Winter,” which means that the good friend always loves in both richness and poverty. That is why the Scriptures state that the friend is not recognized in prosperity, but rather in adversity, as the false friend is he who goes after the good table and good times of the beloved, but disappears in times of poverty and adversity, because he did not love the man, but rather his prosperity. Proverbs 12 says: “Qui negligit damnum propter amicum, iustus est” (12:26), in other words he who ignores his own profit or harm for love of his beloved is a loyal friend, because he loves the friend, not his own prosperity. The great Hrabanus thus exclaimed: “Oh God! What a great thing friendship is, as where it is found there is no need to punish the wrongdoers nor to do justice, because nobody has to demand anything from the other nor do him any harm!” It is a source of union that transforms ones and the others. It preserves lordships and the communities, makes people happy and keeps them away from sin, and makes them pleasurable for God and for men. So, he says, we all have to desire it, as it wants us, and is so noble and profitable! It is therefore worth the good prince working to preserve true, clear, and sincere friendships in his domains, these being the ones that contribute to conserving the prosperity of public affairs. Here ends the eighth degree of natural colligation, which is friendship.76

76  “Qui figura vera amistat en semblança d’una ymatge. Rabanus, De naturis rerum, sí� posa aytal imatge a amistat, ço és, un jove vestit de vert qui havia lo cor ubert e nafrat, qui tenia en son libell escrit axí�: “Vida e Mort, Lluny e Prop, en Estiu e Hivern.” E expòs ací� Lucius Lucanus, poeta, axí�: Diu que l’amich se deu ensenyar jove a l’amat, ço és fort a estar per ell e alegrament soferir-ne mal, e deu ensenyar gran alegria de sa presència, segons que tracta Aristòtil, VIII Ethicorum, cap. VI et nono. Aprés diu que vestia vert, qui és color cencera e confortant lo vis, e troba·s en pedres, e à ver raï�l de mixtures fermes, e significa lealtat, la qual sobre totes coses deu aparer en l’amich. Mas ara

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The image of the young man dressed in green is again rooted in Robert Holcot, but in this case, the source was not the Postilla in librum Sapientiae Salomonis, but rather his Moralitates. This was a collection of images of memory, mainly based on classical myths, which, together with the Fulgentius metaforalis by Franciscan John Ridevall, became

és ver ço que dix Jeremias: Omnis amicos fraudulenter incedit; per tal diu: Maledictus qui confidit in homine quia omnis amicus subplantavit me. E vol dir que tota amistat és ara falsa, e per tal diu que malaÿt sia aquell qui confia en hom e posa en carn sa esperança, car tot amich va falsament a l’altre. D’aquests diu Job que no han pietat de lur amich qui carament los ama, e ells no a ell, com emperò, diga Job VIº: Qui tollit ab amico misericordiam timorem Domini dereliquit. E vol dir que aquell qui no fa pietat a l’amich ajudant-li lealment, la un pot dir que aquell ha desemparada la temor de Déu e és fort cruel a aquell qui l’ama negant-li la amor que li deu. D’açò recompta maravelles Valerius Maximus, libro quarto, capitulo De amicicia, e recompta aquí� que, com Marcus Antonius agués escapçat Lucillum, qui avia consentit en la mort de Juli Cèsar, Nolinus, companyó del dit mort, requès que aprés tan car amich ell no visqués e requès lo dit Antoni que·l faés auciure aprés ell. E diu que pres lo cap de Lucillo besant-lo e abraçant-lo dient:—Grans gràcies faç a Déu que, pus que en vida fom tots ajustats per cara amor, que aprés la mort siam tostemps soterrats en un loch! (E aquí� escapçaren-lo). Diu encara, terçament, que avia lo cor ubert e nafrat, car a l’amich car res no li deus tenir tancat, segons que diu Sènecha, Ad Lucillum, libro primo. Deu encara aparer nafrat, car deu-se sentir mortalment de tot afany de l’amich, e·l deu remediar aytant com pot per bona ajuda, e que no li u caja dir: Bastar-li deu que u sàpia. Quartament, havia en son libell: “Vita et Mors,” car lo car amich és a hom vida. Ecclesiastici XXII: In bonis amici anima decorabitur. E vol dir que la ànima de l’hom sa endolcex e reeb novella vida veent les noblees e bonees de son amat. É� s-li encara mort la sua mort, car, com sien una cosa, mort d’amich és quax mort de l’amat, així� com diu de si matex sent Agostí� en les sues Confessions. Lo quint punt era aquí� exponedor lo “Lluny e Prop” qui era escrit en lo dit libell, car així� deu hom ésser car amich luny com prop. E malaÿt sia aquell amich en qui és ver que, mort ne absent, no ha amich ne parent. Diu Carpoforus in Dietario que les dones de Lí�bia totes avien quatre enamorats, sens los marits, car dien que la amor los era la vida e per tal tostemps la volien veure present en queucom e, com los marits fossen soví�n absents, per tal la volien veure en altre present, axí� que tostemps un de lurs enamorats avia a ésser en la ciutat present. E deyen que elles no amaven negun hom, mas amaven la amor en presència, axí� com aquell qui vol menjar carn no·s cura del tallador, emperò, per tal quant la carn tostemps ha a venir en tallador, per tal ha a aver tallador. Així� deyen elles que no amaven los hòmens, mas la amor present, e per tal quant aytal amor avien a veure en qualque hom, per tal covenia que aguessen los hòmens avent la presència de la amor. Les quals paraules, diu Carpòforus, eren fort tacanyes, emperò, pus que los marits ho soferien, diu ell, més nos deurí�em girar a parlar contra ells que no contra elles. Lo sisèn punt, qui era “Yvern e Estiu,” volia dir que bon amich axí� ama en pobrea com en riquea. Per tal diu la Escriptura que l’amich no conex hom quant hom ha prosperitat, mas en la adversitat, car diu que lo fals amich és aquell qui seguex la bona taula e lo bon temps de l’amat, mas en temps de pobrea e de adversitat fuig e no està, car no amava l’om, mas la prosperitat que avia. Proverbiorum XII avem: Qui necligit dampnum propter amicum justus est. E vol dir que aquell qui menysprea son propri profit o dampnatge per amor de son amat, aquell és leal amich, car l’amich ama e no sa prosperitat. Diu ací� aquell gran Rabanus:—O Déu! E quant és notable cosa la amistat, car lla on ella és no y cal curar de ponir malsfaytors ne de fer justí�cia, car negun no demana res a l’altre ne fa mal a negun! Aquesta liga, e honex e trasforma los uns en los altres. Aquesta conserva les senyories e les comunitats, fa les gens alegres e les lunya de pecat, e les fa plaens a Déu e als hòmens. Donchs, diu ell, tots vullam aquesta, pus que ella nos vol e tant és nobla e a nós profitosa! Per què lo bon prí�ncep attena de fer conservar en sa senyoria veres, e netes e senceres amistats, axí� com aquelles qui són conservació de tota prosperitat de la cosa pública. E açò sia dit del huytèn grau de la col·ligació natural, qui era amistat.” Cited from Francesc Eiximenis, Dotzè del Crestià, ed. Curt Wittlin (Girona, 1987), 300–302 (chap. 807).



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what Beryl Smalley dubbed a kind of mytho­logia praedicabilis.77 However, I believe, as we shall see below, that Eiximenis was quoting from memory and that, in his mind, he must have allided various versions of this image, which were popular: Holcot’s, naturally, but also Ridevall’s Fulgentius metaforalis, the very popular Postilla supra Epistolam ad Titum by Jean de Hesdin, and one by Pierre Bersuire. I have been unable to find any image of friendship in Bersuire’s Repertorium morale, but as Hesdin’s text was based on Bersuire, I think there is enough to see Eiximenis’ debt to all four of them: ROBERT HOLCOT: Fulgentius explains in a book titled De gestis romanorum that the Romans described love, or true friendship, as follows: the image of love, or of friendship, was painted in the form of a very neat young man dressed in green. His face was bare and “Summer and Winter” was written on his forehead. His side was open so his heart was visible, and there the following words were written: “Far and Near.” And on the tassels of the tunic one could read “Death and Life.” This image also had the feet bare.78 JEAN HESDIN: True friendship is portrayed like this: a young man with a childish face and bare head, dressed in a green tunic; “Life and Death” is written on his left hand; on his forehead he has “Winter and Summer” written. He had one flank open to the heart on which “Far and Near” had been written.79

JEAN HESDIN: But we can see how much God loves us perfectly through the description of the image of friendship that the prior of St. Eligius gives, who assures he got it from Rabanus, in the book De natura rerum: (Friendship) is painted, or sculpted in the form of a young man with a crown on his head, where there were four stones, who was wearing a green tunic, with tassels on which were written (Life and Death, Summer and Winter, Far and Near. And he seemed to have his heart open).80 77  Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity, 111 n. 54.

78  “Narrat Fulgentius in quodam libro De gestis romanorum quod romani verum amorem sive veram amicitiam hoc modo descripserunt, scilicet, quod imago amoris vel amicitiae depicta erat instar iuvenis cuisdam valde pulchri, induti habitu virido. Facies eius et caput discooperta erat sive mudata, et in fronte ipsius erat hoc scriptum: Hyems et Aestas. Erat latus eius apertum, ita ut videretur cor, in quo scripta erant haec verba: Longe et Prope. Et in fimbria vestimenti eius erat scriptum: Mors et Vita. Similiter ista imago habebat pedes nudos et cetera.” Cited from the second edition of the Moralitates that comes after the Postilla in librum Sapientiae Salomonis. From Robert Holcot, Postilla in librum Sapientiae Salomonis (Lyon, 1586), 731.

79  “Amicitia uera sic depingitur: Unus iuvenis faciem habens puerilem, discooperto capite, indutus tunica viridi, in cuius sinistra scribebatur Vita et Mors, et in fronte scribebatur Hyems et Aestas. Habet latus apertum usque cor in quo scribebatur Longe et Prope.” Cited from Judson Boyce Allen, “Commentary as Criticism: The Text, Influence, and Literary Theory of the Fulgentius Metaforalis of John Ridevall,” in Acta conventus neo-latini Amstelodamensis. Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Amsterdam, 19–24 August 1973), ed. P. Tuynman, G. C. Kuiper, and E. Kessler (Munich, 1979), 25–47 at 27.

80  “Sed quomodo Deus nos invicem diligit satis possumus habere ex descriptione imaginis amicitiae, quam ponit prior sancti Eligii, quam dicit se habere a Rabano, libro De Natura rerum. Depingebatur sive sculpebatur specie iuvenis, coronati corona in qua erant quatuor lapides pretiosi induti tunica viridi, in cuius fimbriis erat scriptum (in giro Vita et Mors, Estas et Hyemps, Longe et Prope. Et videbatur habere cor apertum).” Cited from Beryl Smalley, “Jean de Hesdin O. Hosp. S. Ioh.,” in Studies in Medi­eval Thought and Learning from Abelard to Wyclif (London, 1981), 345–97 at 390. The part cited between brackets, as Beryl Smalley did not edit it, is from Toulouse,

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If Eiximenis took the reference to De natura rerum and Hrabanus from Hesdin, or perhaps from Pierre Bersuire, the detail of the open heart seems to come from Holcot or Ridevall. In contrast, Eiximenis concentrated the three pairs of syntagmas, which the two English friars spread across the body of the young man dressed in green, in the book that he has in his hands, an innovation that could have some relation with the French versions, where the syntagmas are placed on the tassels on the tunic. This image of friendship by Holcot has an impressive presence in literature and art from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. We can find it in both lyrical texts like Le livre du voir dit by Guillaume Machaut, and prose texts, like the Sentència in the poetic contest of St. Just (Barcelona); in sermons and manuals for preaching, like the Fasciculus morum; in medi­eval miniatures; the genre of emblemata; and in works of art in the modern age, like the relief on the stairs at the university in Salamanca.81 This is an authentic imago agens, not a similitude in the style of those proposed in the Ars praedicandi populo, since we can say it had a surprising and unusual character. Thomas Bradwardine would undoubtedly have considered it as such, because in his De memoria artificiali he recommends the use of images of extreme intensity, these being the ones the memory retains better. One of the examples he gives evokes Holcot’s image of friendship: But their nature should be wondrous and intense, because such things are impressed in memory more deeply and are better retained. However, such things are for the most part not moderate, but extreme, as something greatly beautiful or ugly, joyous or sad […] or maybe a person who has been injured with an enormous open wound flowing with a remarkable river of blood or in some other way made ugly, having strange clothing and every bizarre embellishment.82

Eiximenis deals with the description of the image of friendship in a single sentence. The rest of the chapter in the Dotzè del Crestià is a detailed commentary on its six fundamental elements: the young man, the green tunic, the open and wounded heart, and the three pairs of syntagmas written in the book it must be supposed the young man held in his hands. While Eiximenis followed the Latin model very closely in the image of Bibliothèque municipale, MS 54, fol. 88ra, which I’ve consulted through the web of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, Paris. Incidentally, the prior of Saint Eligius was Pierre Bersuire.

81  In the poem by Machaut there is a section titled “L’ymage de vraie amour” which is a trans­lation in verse of the image of friendship. Regarding the sentence of the poetry contest of Sant Just, Sadurní� Martí�, “La sentencia del certamen poético de Sant Just (1438): edición y estudio preliminar,” Scripta 10 (2017): 1–25, esp. 16; regarding the Fasciculus morum, see Siegfried Wenzel, Verses in Sermons. Fasciculus morum and its Middle English Poems (Cam­bridge, 1978), 58, and regarding the emblems, see Beatriz Antón, “La Vera Amicitia en los Emblemata (1546) de Denis Lebey de Batilly,” in Studia classica et emblematica caro magistro Francisco J. Talauera dicata, ed. Victoria Eugenia Rodrí�guez (Zaragoza, 2019), 102–152.

82  “Qualitas vero sit mirabilis et intensa, quia talia in memoria imprimuntur profundius et melius retinentur. Talia autem ut plurimum non sunt media sed extrema, ut summe pulchrum vel turpe, delectabile vel triste […] aut vulneratum in vulnere multum patente notabili rivo sanguinis defluente vel aliter deturpatum, vestis extranea et omnis mirabilis apparatus.” Cited from Mary Carruthers, “Thomas Bradwardine, De memoria artificiali adquirenda,” The Journal of Medi­eval Latin 2 (1992): 25–43 at 36. English translation from Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medi­eval Craft of Memory, 208.



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Bacchus, in the case of the image of friendship, he recycles it more freely. He maintains the details of the young man, the green tunic, and the open and wounded heart, but at the same time he introduces changes of some importance: he eliminates the details of the bare head and face; he concentrates in the book the three inscriptions that spread over the body or the tassels on the young man’s tunic in the Latin model; and lastly, the comments on the image are much more extensive than those by Holcot or Hesdin and there is no shortage of more or less classicizing elements. When Eiximenis began to write the Dotzè del Crestià, he had already finished and published the Ars praedicandi populo.83 That means his art of the memory was already formulated, and when he recycled the image of friendship, he ended up applying some of his theoretical principles. On one hand, the image of the young man dressed in green fits precisely with the use of the human body as a place, more than an image, of memory as recommended in the Ars, and, on the other, the detail, added ex novo by Eiximenis, of the book as an image of memory was already envisaged in the Ars praedicandi populo. In the pages of the Ars dedicated to explaining how to record “things signified by words” (res significatae per nomina), Eiximenis propounds eight different ways of making this possible. The fourth way is the exploitation of the human body as an image or memory place; the fifth is envisioning the book in which the material was studied; and the sixth consists, according to Eiximenis, in combining, or mixing, elements of the previous methods. We can easily find these orders in many ways: (1) in major roads and paths known to us […] (4) in the human body and its ordered members; (5) in the book in which one studies many subjects; (6) in a mixture of all these methods and others similar to them […] Fourth, the same principle is obviously applicable to the human body, beginning from the feet up to the hair or viceversa […] Fifth, you can create order in the book in which you study, by thinking that this idea (sententia) is in such a part of the book and that idea in another […] Sixth, when one has to memorize things quickly and no order appears that lends itself to arranging our preposition in a memorable way, then mix the orders together.84

83  The Ars praedicandi must have been written before the start of the Western Schism. For this question see Xavier Renedo, “Tres notes sobre l’Ars praedicandi populo de Francesc Eiximenis (autoria, datació i contingut),” Anuario de Estudios Medi­evales 42, no. 1 (2012): 253–71. In contrast, the early part of the Dotzè del Crestià was written between Barcelona and Valencia at the start of the 1380s and the whole of it was finished in the early months of 1387. On this dating, see Xavier Renedo, “Notes sobre la datació del Dotzè del Crestià de Francesc Eiximenis,” Annals de l’Institut d’Estudis Gironins 52 (2011): 207–224.

84  “Sciendum autem quod tales ordines possumus faciliter accipere in multis. Et primo in magnis viis et itineribus notis […] quarto in corpore humano et in membris ordinatis; quinto in libro proprio in quo studere habes plures diversitates; sexto in commixtione ex precedentibus et rebus bene ligatis […] Quarto, patet idem in corpore humano, incipiendo a pedibus usque ad crines vel e converso […] Quinto, potes idem ordinare in libro proprio in quo studes, cogitando quod talis sentencia est in tali parte libri et tali in tali […] Sexto, quando in rebus subito memorandis non occurrat aliquis ordo qui per rectum ordinem deducat ad memoriam proposita nostra, tunc sunt ordines miscendi.” Cited from Barcelona, “L’Ars praedicandi de Francesc Eiximenis,” 27–28. English translation by Kimberley Rivers in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medi­eval Craft of Memory, 199–202.

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Eiximenis has recycled the image of friendship following the rules of his Ars. He does so skilfully, mixing the images of the young man and the booklet and assigning each of the two elements of the new image the same number of points to comment on (three on each side). The freedom with which Eiximenis recycles the image of friendship in the Dotzè del Crestià is perhaps at least partly due to the fact that he must be quoting from memory. Two details lead me to believe that. On one hand, in Eiximenis’ version, the order of the three syntagmas in the booklet is different from that in Holcot or in Ridevall and Hesdin. On the other, the comment or, in Holcot’s words, the “mytho­logiae expositio,” by Eiximenis only shares with the Latin models commonplaces of friendship that overcome distances and persevere beyond death. Indeed, it is possible that Eiximenis cites or recycles from memory the image of the young man dressed in green, without any Latin source before him. Or perhaps what he had in front of him was one of his own sermons in which he had used and recycled by heart the image based only on what he remembered.85 (There is a detail in the comment on the image that recalls preaching techniques: the four biblical verses spread throughout the chapter concord in the word amicus.) Whatever the case, Eiximenis used the art of the artificial memory to construct this image, whether it was conceived to be inserted into a sermon and then passed to the Dotzè, or it came from Eiximenis’ memory, without sermons in between, in the pages of his great political encyclopaedia. The image of friendship presented in the Dotzè, unlike the image of drunkenness in the Terç, does not exhibit many classicizing elements in itself. But some classicizing details, however spurious, occur in Eiximenis’s comments, as the commentary begins with a citation from a supposedly classical authority (Lucius Lucanus, poeta), very likely, as was often the case, an invention created to give a veneer of prestige to the commentary. In Eiximenis, the mention of the colour green is very positive. This is a “natural colour” (color cencera) that comforts the sight, is found in precious stones like emeralds or carbuncle, and represents loyalty.86 After two biblical citations, the commentary on the colour green ends with another classical reference, in this case authentic, extracted from the Dictorum factorum memorabiliumque (IV,7,5) by Valerius Maximus:87 the story, converted into an exemplum, is of the loyal friendship, beyond death, between Volumnus and Marcus Lucullum. The mention of the open and wounded heart contains a single 85  Unfortunately the trail of the sermons by Eiximenis has been lost. It has only been possible to identify a few lines from one of these. See Josep Perarnau, “Un fragment del Liber sermonum de Francesc Eiximenis,” Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 10 (1991): 284–92.

86  In the Late Middle Ages, green was the colour of youth (Michel Pastoreau, “Les emblèmes de la jeunesse. Attributs et mises en scène des jeunes dans l’image médiévale,” in Histoire des jeunes en Occident. 1. De l’antiquité à l’époque moderne, ed. Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris, 1994), 255–76 at 271–72). Pastoreau shows that, since ancient times, green was connected with the power to fortify the eye and balance eyesight (Michel Pastoreau, Vert. Histoire d’une couleur (Paris, 2013), 62). It is also valued as the colour of hope (Pastoreau, Vert, 85), which Eiximenis transforms into loyalty.

87  Valerius Maximus, Dictorum factorum memorabiliumque libri novem, ed. Karl Kempf (Leipzig, 1888), 205–6.



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quotation, also classical, from the Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (I, 3).88 “Vida e Mort” is taken from a biblical verse perhaps quoted from memory, because the reference is wrong, and a phrase from Augustine’s Confessions (VI, 11).89 After this latter citation there are no further classicizing references, unless we bear in mind it also includes a story supposedly taken from the Dietario by Carpophorus, another probable invention by Eiximenis, like his Lucius Lucanus poeta.

Animals and Similitudes in Vicent Ferrer’s Memory

The images of memory in the Terç and the Dotzè del Crestià did not follow the guidelines of the Ars praedicandi populo, as, instead of similitudes, they are veritable imagines agentes. By contrast, in the sermons of Vicent Ferrer we do find figures or similitudes of the memory that follow the recommendations of Eiximenis and the moderni. Over the last twenty years of his life, Ferrer preached several thousand sermons while travelling around half of Europe. A preacher as well-trained as he was necessarily had to use techniques from the art of memory in his preaching campaigns. We can see this in a sermon in which the similitudes of memory were made visible to facilitate recording in the listeners’ memory. As Carlo Delcorno recalls, “non si tratta più soltanto di ricordare, ma sopratutto di far ricordare ai fedeli,” which was usually done through an “imagery tutta esterna, spesso caricaturale, esclusivamente preoccupata di rappresentare vizi e virtú.”90 We have a good example of all this in a sermon dedicated to the temptations of St. Anthony, based on the life written by Athanasius of Alexandria, popularized in the Legenda aurea, and articulated through the three enemies of the soul: the world, the devil, and the flesh. This sermon is contained in the books of sermon-schemes in Perugia and the Vatican Library. Josep Perarnau classified them in the catalogue of Vicent Ferrer’s sermons as numbers 94 and 95.91 I have been unable to consult all the evidence gathered by Perarnau, but I believe there is an error in this point and that the texts numbered 94 and 95 are really variants of the same scheme. All the sermons in these two families follow the same biblical theme (“Certamen forte dedit illi, ut vinceret,” Wis. 88  The sentence “you don’t have to have anything locked up to a friend” (a l’amich res no li deus tenir tancat) is from the following passage in the Lletres a Lucili (I,3): “Think long whether someone should be admitted into your friendship. When you have decided to accept them, accept them with all your heart and speak to them as freely as you do to yourself […] Why would I keep any word from my friend?” (diu cogita, an tibi in amicitiam aliquis recipiendus sit. Cum placuerit fieri, toto illum pectore admitte: tam audacter cum illo loquere quam tecum […] Quid est quare ego ulla uerba coram amico meo retraham?). Cited from Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, ed. Edward Capps, Thomas Ethelbert Page, and William Henry Denham Rouse, 3 vols. (London, 1917), 1:10.

89  Aurelius Augustinus, Confessiones, ed. Edward Bouverie Pusey (Oxford, 1832), 91. The verse In bonis amici anima decorabitur is not from Eccles. 22 as indicated by Eiximenis (Dotzè Crestià, 301), but rather from Prov. 27:9.

90  Delcorno, “L’ars praedicandi di Bernardino da Siena,” 454–55. See further on this topic: Rivers, Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice, 7 and 153–154. 91  Josep Perarnau, “Aportació a un inventari de sermons de sant Vicenç Ferrer: temes bí�blics, tí�tols i divisions esquemàtiques,” Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 18 (1999): 515–516.

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10:12) and have the same structure. In fact, the only difference is that, despite all the sermons being variants on the same model, the similitudes of the memory of the two families have nothing in common. Let us explore this further. In the scheme found in the manu­script from Perugia, the oldest surviving version of this sermon, the discourse is divided into three sections, present in all the sermons in the series and based on the three enemies of the soul: “the deceitful world” (mundum decipientem), “the flesh that poisons” (carnem inficientem) and “the enemy that threatens” (hostem deicentem). Each of the three branches, and the three enemies, is represented by an animal, which is present in the initial comparison: a bear, a serpent and a lion. In the case of the second and third branches in the supporting biblical verse, or verses, the animal in the initial comparison is mentioned: Firstly, the world fights against man like the bear who, in the middle of the path, pretends that it wants to embrace and kiss the man, but in the end, seizing him, kills and devours him. 1 Jn. 5:19, “We know that we are of God and that the whole world is under the power of the malign.” […] Secondly, the flesh fights against us like the serpent does in silence, Prov. 23:32, “that advances smooothly, but in the end it bites like a snake and stings like a basilisk.” […] Thirdly, the devil fights like the lion, that leaps violently onto its prey. Ps. 17:12, “They are like a lion hungry for prey, like a fierce lion crouching in cover” and 1 Pet. 5:8, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”92

In the first branch, only one biblical verse is cited, which has the word mundus in common with the thematic nucleus of the branch. In the second branch, there is a single verse of support, that concords with the initial comparison through the word serpens, while in the third branch, two biblical citations and the word leo appear in both, which also matches the initial comparison. So, this is a sermon with three branches, each with an animal comparison and one or two biblical verses of support that concord vocally with the world, the devil, and the flesh, either directly in the first case, or indirectly in the second and third branches. The volume from Perugia presents the sermon reduced to its essential elements: animal comparisons, biblical verses, and references to the life of St. Anthony condensed into a tele­graphic style. Thus, the three animal comparisons play a crucial role in the text, for I believe that each one summarizes, as a similitude of the memory, a branch of the sermon. We shall see this more clearly in two better developed versions, the result 92  “De 1º, mundus pugnat contra hominem quasi ursus in via qui ostendit se velle amplexari et osculari hominem, et constrigendo interficit ac devorat, 1 Jn. 5:19: Scimus quoniam ex Deo sumus; et mundus totus [in maligno positus est] […] De 2º, caro pugnat contra nos quasi serpens in silentio, Prov. 23: 31: Ingreditur blande, [sed in novissimo mordebit ut coluber, et sicut regulus venena diffundet] […] De 3º, dyabulos pugnat, quasi leo insiliens violenter supra predam, Ps 16:12: Susceperunt me sicut leo [paratus ad praedam], etc. 1 Pet. 5:8: Adversarius vester dyabolus [tanquam leo rugiens circuit, quaerens quem devoret].” Cited from Francisco M. Gimeno Blay and Marí�a Luz Mandingorra Llavata, eds., San Vicente Ferrer. Sermonario de Perugia (Convento dei Domenicani, ms. 477) (Valencia, 2006), 141. I have completed the biblical verses that appear in the manu­script from Perugia reduced to the minimum expression by placing the added fragments between brackets, to show the concordance between the animal in the comparison and the biblical reference.



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of two different reportationes, of this same sermon, one in Catalan, in a manu­script in Valencia Cathedral, and the other in Latin in a manu­script in the College of the Patriarch, or Corpus Christi, in Valencia.93 In the sermon in Catalan, the first branch begins by giving the figure of the bear a central role as a similitude of memory, representing the treachery of the world. The same way, Vicent Ferrer says, that the world tries to seduce man with two arms, the arm of wealth and the arm of honours, the bear tries to trick its victims by raising its arms and smiling. As the world has two arms, one of riches and one of honours, it seems to want to follow the custom of the bear, that, when it can’t find food anywhere, comes out onto a path and when it sees someone coming it stands there, with its arms open, smiling with its mouth open while it waits, and the man, trusting it, lets the bear laughing, laughing embraces him, and when it has him firmly in its grasp it crushes him so hard that it kills him, and then eats him. The world acts in the same way, as can be seen in the following authority: “And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness.”94

After this ­graphic comparison, Ferrer develops the metaphor of the two arms of the world, and the bear, applying it to the bio­graphy of St. Anthony, who sold all his possessions to dedicate himself in body and soul to the eremitic life and “so break the first arm of the world,” that of riches.95 Later, by ignoring the temptations of the devil who wanted to seduce him by offering a silver plate and golden fruit, St. Anthony also defeated the second arm, that of worldly honours. In the volume of sermons from the College of the Patriarch in Valencia, there is a sermon in Latin with the same theme and contents. It was delivered in Tordesillas, in Ferrer’s preaching campaign in Castile, on Sunday, January 17, 1412, the feast of St. Anthony the Great.96 The beginning of the first branch of this sermon also contains the similitude of the bear and has many correspondences with the sermon in Catalan in Valencia Cathedral: Firstly, the world dominates us and fights against us deceitfully, because it tricks men showing us a happy smiling face. In the same way as the bear that wants to devour someone stops in the middle of the path and stretches its arms out as if it wanted to embrace you, it smiles and shows you its teeth, and, if it catches you, it will squeeze your ribs and

93  I have been unable to consult the two notebooks of schemes in the Vatican Library, but, given the description of these in Josep Perarnau’s catalogues, they seem to be very similar, if not identical, to the scheme in the Perugia manu­script.

94  “On, com lo món haje dos braços, la hu de riquees, l’altre de honors, par que vulle tenir la manera de l’onso, que quan no trobe què menjar, hix al camí�, e quan veu venir l’om, ell està dret ab los braços estesos e riu-se envers ell ab la boqua uberta e spere’l, e l’hom no guardant-se d’ell, l’onso abrace’l rient, rient, e quan lo ha aferrat ab abduys los braços, estreny-lo fort, e tant, que·l mate, e puix menge’l-se. Axí� fa lo món: e que tal sie lo món, has-ne autoritat: Scimus quoniam ex Deo sumus (et mundus totus in maligno positus est).” Cited from Sant Vicent Ferrer, Sermons. Volum cinquè, ed. Gret Schib (Barcelona, 1984), 22. 95  “axí� rompé lo primer braç del món.” Ferrer, Sermons, 23.

96  Pedro M. Cátedra, Sermón, sociedad y literatura en la Edad Media. San Vicente Ferrer en Castilla (1411–1412) (Salamanca, 1994), 72.

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kill you, the world receives you with its arms open wide—the right arm for prosperity, and the left for adversity—, and with those two arms it deceitfully devours many people and defeats them, for it does not let you breathe and lift up to God, but down, down to the world. Thus it seduces you with the arm of prosperities and pulls you, but then with the arm of adversities it squeezes and crushes you and so makes it possible for you to condemn yourself, as it is said in Jn. 1:5: “We know that we are God’s and that the whole world is under the power of the malign.”97

Both the Catalan and Latin sermons follow the scheme laid down in the Perugia manu­ script and develop the image of the bear hug in the same way, and both finish up with the same biblical quotation. In the second branch, or distinction, concerning the flesh, there are fewer points of contact between these two sermons, at least in the extant version. The sermon in the College of the Patriarch is the one that most faithfully follows the scheme of Perugia, developing the image of the serpent that attacks unseen: The second battle takes place when the flesh fights against us in hiding. And this is a very hard battle, because the enemy is always beside the man, eats and drinks with him and fights in a tight place, that is within each one’s body. And the flesh struggles in secret and hidden, like a serpent that nobody sees until it attacks. That is what happens with the flesh, because before you are aware, without realizing, it will attack and poison you, and it will do so, firstly, when you contemplate the beauty of a woman […] And the same will happen touching her hands, talking to her, greeting and kissing her, as Prov. 23 reminds us: “… it goes down smoothly! In the end it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper.” And it says basilisk because the other serpents only poison with their bite, but the basilisk even poisons with its sight and kills everyone who sees it. And so the flesh poisons and kills the soul, because it has poison in its eyes, like the basilisk.98

97  “Ad primum, quod mundus tenet et bellat contra nos enganyosamente. Nam hostendendo nobis faciem ilarem et ridibilem decipit homines. Nam, sicut hursus qui vult devorare aliquem, parat se in medio itineris examplando brachia, quasi vellit te anplexare, et ridet, tibi docendo dentes, et, si recipit te, stringet tibi costellas et occidet te, ita mundus hostendit tibi brachia anpla, scilicet dexterum prosperitatem, et sinistrum, scilicet adversitatem. Et cum istis duobus brachis, enganyose multos devorat, et vincit, quod non permitit eos alendare et spirare supra ad Deum, sed infra ad mundum. Nam cum brachio prosperitatum recipit te ad seducendo, et post cum alio adversitatum coadiuvat restringendo, et facit dapnare, etc. ut habetur Jn. 5:19: Nos scimus quoniam, etc, positus est.” Cited from Francisco M. Gimeno Blay and Marí�a Luz Mandingorra Llavata, eds., Sermonario de San Vicente Ferrer del Real Colegio-Seminario del Corpus-Christi de Valencia (Valencia, 2002), 786–787. 98  “Ad secundum bellum, quod caro pugnat contra nos absconse. Et bene est fortis batalla ista, nam inimicus vadit senper cum homine, et comedit, et dormit, et bellant in stricto loco, scilicet intra corpus cuiuslibet. Et caro pugnat secrete et absconse, sicut serpens, quem homo non sentit nisi cum fizat; ita caro, nam priusquam te recordaberis non sentiendo fizabit et invironabit te, scilicet primo respiciendo formosuram mulieris […] Et idem tangendo manus, et loquendo, et salutando, et osculando, etc. ad hoc ut habetur Prov XXIII [31–32]: Ingreditur blande, etc, refundet. Et dicit basiliscus, nam ceteri serpentes non verinant nisi mordeant, sed basiliscus etiam videndo verinat et occidit omnes quos videt, et ita in oculis habet venenum. Et ita caro videndo verinat et occidit animam. Et sic habet venenum in oculis sicut basiliscus.” Cited from Gimeno Blay and Mandingorra Llavata, Sermonario de San Vicente Ferrer, 788–89.



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The Latin sermon continues the discourse by linking the similitude of the serpent to the bio­graphy of St. Anthony, a champion in the struggle against the diabolical temptations with a life full of austerity and fasting, with no other excess than the maximum rigour in penitence. Ferrer continues the game of correspondences between the serpent and St. Anthony, comparing the antidote with the rigorous penitence the saint was subjected to: “And so the blessed Anthony defeated this enemy and the serpent of the flesh with the theriac of penitence, that is to say, abstinence and affliction.”99 In the sermon in Catalan from Valencia Cathedral, there is no allusion to the metaphor of the serpent nor the verse in Prov. 23: 31 that supports it. Does that mean that in the oral version of the sermon, neither the serpent nor the biblical quote it is associated with appear? I do not believe they do and their absence should be explained by a gap in the reporting. The third distinction of the sermon, on the devil, talks about two types of diabolical temptations related to the life of St. Anthony. In the first, demons took human form and beat St. Anthony with sticks until he was left half dead. In the second temptation, they appeared in the form of wild animals that attacked him in all possible ways. The Catalan sermon talks about “various wild beasts, in other words oxen, bears, wild boar, vipers, and serpents.”100 It talks about bears and serpents, but nowhere is the lion mentioned, but this, in contrast, appears later on, at the end of the moral lesson on St. Anthony’s temptations, when it cites the verse from the first epistle of St. Peter present in the Perugia manu­script, which talks about the devil “like a roaring lion” (tam quam leo rugiens). Does this mean the oral version of the sermon only talked about the lion right at the end, from the biblical quotation? I think we should reject this, and assume a likely error in the reportatio. It reminds me of the third distinction in the Latin sermon from the library of the College of the Patriarch, beginning by comparing the lion with the devil: The third battle that we have raised is against the devil, who fights violently against us, because, in the same way as the lion is watchful and when it sees a lamb, or a sheep, it launches itself violently onto it and kills it, that is how the devil acts […]. That is why it is said in 1 Pet. 5, “Your adversary the devil … seeking whom he may devour: … Resist steadfast in the faith.”101

What is most likely is that the comparison of the lion appeared in the oral version of the sermon conserved in Catalan, as it does in the Latin version, at the start of the third distinction, but the reporters must not have picked it up, so it has not come down to us. 99  “Et ideo beatus Antonius vincit istum inimicum et serpentem carnis cum triaca penitencie, scilicet abstinencie et afliccionis.” Cited from Gimeno Blay and Mandingorra Llavata, Sermonario de San Vicente Ferrer, 789.

100  “bèsties feres diverses, ço és de bous, orsos, porchs, vipres e serps.” Cited from Ferrer, Sermons, 25 n. 69.

101  “Ad tercium bellum quod habemus est demon, qui bellat violenter contra nos. Nam, sicut leo stat expectando ad obviam, et cum videt agnum, vel ovem, vel aliam predam, violenter gafat et honerat se super eam, ita facit dèmon […] Et ideo habetur 1 Petr V [8–9]: Adversarius vester diabolus, etc, devoret, etc, in fide.” Cited from Gimeno Blay and Mandingorra Llavata, Sermonario de San Vicente Ferrer, 790.

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At least since the date of the manu­script of schemes from Perugia, the comparison of the lion, as a similitude of memory connected to the verse from 1 Peter, must have been present in the oral performance of the majority of versions that have “Certamen forte dedit illi, ut vinceret” as a theme (Wis. 10:12). However, it must be mentioned that, in the so-called Toulouse version of the de sanctis sermons, one is dedicated to St. Anthony. In this, despite having the same theme, content, and structure as the previous sermons, there is no trace of the similitude of the lion, nor that of the bear or the serpent, and I do not believe this was due to an omission by the reportatores. This is a model sermon in which the similitudes and, at the same time, images of the memory of the bear, the serpent, and the lion are replaced with a very different similitude. In the introductio thematis to this sermon, which has survived in the Latin version, human life is presented as a battlefield in both body and soul in which the enemies of the body are said to be the four qualities, which provoke all kinds of disease because of their perpetual imbalance. The enemies of the soul are the worldly miseries: dangers, anguishes, poverty, etc. In the introductio thematis and also when deploying the divisio thematis, Ferrer also employs a three-part structure, but one based on a completely new image without parallel in either the scheme from Perugia, the Catalan sermon from the Valencia Cathedral, or the Latin one from the College of the Patriarch. [Introduction to the theme:] The present life is nothing more than a battlefield for both body and soul […]. You can understand this fight through the following similitude: imagine in this field there is a noble and delicate maiden, who is attacked by three knights; one of whom approaches her from the front with a drawn sword; the second, on the right, approaches her with a crossbow and bolt; and the last, on the left, with a spear. And the maiden is leaning against a wall […]. [Division of the theme:] In practice, how did the blessed Anthony fight and gain a victory? Firstly, he defeated the world, which approached him with a drawn sword; secondly, the flesh, which attacked him from the right with a crossbow ready to fire; and, thirdly, the devil, who approached him from the left shaking a spear.102

This is a new similitude of memory that replaces the images of the bear, the serpent, and the lion from the scheme from Perugia with three warriors threatening a defenceless maiden, who represents everything Christian in body and soul. Each of the warriors carries a different weapon: a sword, a crossbow, and a lance. Following to some degree the nomenclature proposed by Eiximenis in the Ars praedicandi or, if you prefer, by the mod102  “[Introductio thematis]: Presens vita non est nisi campus prelii, et quantum ad corpus, et quantum ad animam […] Istud prelium potestis intelligere per talem similitudinem: ac si in isto campo esset una domicella nobilis et delicata, et impugnaretur a tribus militibus armatis, quorum unus venit ante cum ense evaginato; alius a dextris cum balista et sagitta et cetera; alius a sinistris cum lancea. Et ipsa stat innixa ad parietem […] [Divisio thematis]: Ad practicam quomodo beatus Anthonius habuit prelium et quomodo habuit victoriam, vicit enim: Primo, mundum, qui venit ab ante cum gladio evaginato; secundo, carnem, que venit a dextris cum balista extensa; tercio, dyabolum, qui venit a sinistris, cum lancea vibrante.” From Montserrat, Biblioteca de l’abadia de Montserrat, Sig. 4º 101, fol. 22v, available at www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/sermones-desanctis-fragment-dun-incunable--0/html/000d65c2–82b2–11df-acc7–002185ce6064_151.html, accessed June 17, 2019.



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erns, Ferrer presents this image of memory as a “similitude.” Moreover, this similitude tallies with the subject of the sermon. There is not the slightest trace of the bear or serpent in either the first or second distinctions of this sermon.103 Nor does the second distinction allude to the verse in Prov. 23:31 linked to the image of the serpent. What does reappear, in contrast, is of the theriac as a metaphor of the most rigorous penitence and abstinence to overcome the temptations of the flesh. However, this not a relic of an ancient similitude of the serpent, but rather a very subtle re-adaptation, as the bolts from the second warrior’s crossbow are poisoned and so an antidote against it is required. First, according to Vicent Ferrer, the arrow stuck in the body should be removed, “then apply the theriac against the poison that has been left in the body.”104 As in the Latin sermon in the College of the Patriarch, the theriac is a mixture of penitence and very rigorous fasting followed by devout contemplation on the punishments of hell and purgatory. The bear, serpent, and lion appear in the third distinction of the sermon, but not linked to any image or similitude of the memory, but rather to the series of animals that formed part of the temptations of St. Anthony: “then the devils came in the form of various beasts, that is to say unicorns, lions, bears, and serpents, who attacked him most cruelly.”105 Nor is there any allusion to the verse from 1 Peter 5:8 (“Adversarius vester diabolus tamquam leo rugiens …”) that, from the schemes kept in the Perugia manu­script, linked the image of the memory of the serpent with the Scriptures. In short, the images of the bear, the serpent, and the lion as similitudes of memory have disappeared, replaced by the image of a maiden besieged by three knights, each with a different weapon in his hands. It is a different image, as dynamic as the previous one, and does not alter the structure or contents of the sermon as presented in the manu­script of schemes from Perugia, and it concords in another way with the theme of the sermon. On this point, Ferrer follows Pescher’s warning about always basing the similitudes to 103  In the introductio thematis the serpents, not the serpent, appear in a similitude used to explain diseases as the fatal consequences of the continuous fight between the four qualities in the human body: “the four qualities fight continuously within the body […] corrupting, weakening and opposing each other, as if we had four serpents in our belly fighting and biting each other” (quattuor qualitates intra corpus continue bellant […] corrumpendo, alterando, minuendo et contradicendo ad invicem, ac si teneret in utero quattor serpentes inter se bellantes, mordentes et cetera). From Montserrat, Biblioteca de l’abadia de Montserrat, Sig. 4º 101, fol. 22v, available at www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/sermones-de-sanctis-fragment-dun-incunable--0/ html/000d65c2–82b2–11df-acc7–002185ce6064_151.html, accessed June 17, 2019.

104  “Deinde apponere tyriacam contra venenum quod remanet intus.” From Montserrat, Biblioteca de l’abadia de Montserrat, Sig. 4º 101, fol. 23v, available at www.cervantesvirtual.com/ obra-visor/sermones-de-sanctis-fragment-dun-incunable--0/html/000d65c2–82b2–11df-acc7– 002185ce6064_136.html, accessed June 17, 2019. 105  “Statim venerunt demones in speciebus diversarum bestiarum, scilicet unicornis, leonis, ursi, serpentis et crudeliter invaserunt eum.” From Montserrat, Biblioteca de l’abadia de Montserrat, Sig. 4º 101, fol. 23v–24r, available at www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/sermones-desanctis-fragment-dun-incunable--0/html/000d65c2–82b2–11df-acc7–002185ce6064_136.html and www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/sermones-de-sanctis-fragment-dun-incunable--0/ html/000d65c2–82b2–11df-acc7–002185ce6064_111.html, accessed June 17, 2019.

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memory on biblical passages. The figure of the maiden attacked by three knights armed with a sword, a lance, and a crossbow is justified by the subject of the sermon: “Certamen forte dedit illi, ut vinceret” (Wis. 10:12).106 The same happened with the similitudes of the lion and the snake in the first family of sermons on this same theme: only the image of the bear escapes from this norm. In this sense the similitude of the maiden and the three knights is more successful than that of the three animals, as the figure of the bear does not have the support of a biblical passage. Like Eiximenis, Vicent Ferrer was a modern preacher who learnt in classrooms, libraries, and churches the art of constructing, and remembering, sermons, the technique of building similitudes for the memory, and linking and justifying these with biblical verses. In short, that is what the technique of the modern sermon required, one which Eiximenis explained in the Ars and which Vicent Ferrer developed in his sermons.

106  That is just what Géraud du Pescher demanded after the passage in the Ars faciendi sermones quoted above: “If they want to make distinctions based upon cities or weaponry, and everything they say is based on the Scriptures, or present the figure of the city that John saw in Revelation, which had twelve gates, or many other things, all that has to be approved without the slightest doubt.” (Si autem vellent distinguere de civitate vel de armis et ista que dicunt probarent per Scripturam vel exponerent istam figuram de civitate quam vidit Johannes in Apoc., que habebat xii portas, vel multa alia, illud esset utique adprobandum). Cited from Delorme, “L’Ars faciendi sermones,” 186.

Chapter 3

HISTORY, MEMORY, AND IDEAS ABOUT THE PAST IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES ROSAMOND McKITTERICK

My focus in this paper is two-fold: the uses of memory, and the problems of the relationship between memory and written records of memory in the early middle ages. Particular memories can also be exploited to reinforce an identity or even an ideo­logy. We are all used to everyday journalism and spin as well as the supposed distinction between official and popular versions of history. All these raise the questions of collective and individual manifestations and uses of memory. One question to explore therefore is how helpful modern experience and categorizations may be in interpreting the distant past. I shall use case studies of historical narratives and epitaphs inscribed on stone from the early Middle Ages (ca. 500 to ca. 900) to highlight both the kind of material with which an early medi­eval historian works, and its implications for historical knowledge and interpretation more generally. Flodoard of Reims and the Gate of Mars

Crucial issues about the uses of memory and the relation between memory and written, especially narrative, records of memory, can be demonstrated with two comments made by the tenth-century Frankish historian Flodoard. In his Annales, begun ca. 920, Flodoard casually mentions the Gate of Mars to make it serve as a reference point to locate the nearby church of St. Hilary where a blind man had miraculously had his sight restored.1 In Flodoard’s History of Reims written ca. 950, however, the gate assumed greater significance. In this text Flodoard traced the history of the see of Reims from Sixtus, the first bishop of Reims, allegedly sent by St. Peter to northern Gaul. He further augmented the antiquity of the city and its secular Roman associations by discussing *  Abbreviations to publications and series from the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (hereafter MGH) are explained at www.mgh.de/dmgh/linking/kuerzel/.

1  Flodoard de Reims, Annales, ed. Philippe Lauer (Paris, 1905), 16. See its English translation in The Annals of Flodoard of Reims 919–966, trans. Steven Fanning and Bernard S. Bachrach (Peterborough, Ont., 2004), 24. See also Emma Beddoe, “Memory and Identity in Flodoard of Reims: His Use of the Roman Past,” in Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Christina Pössel, and Philip Shaw (Vienna, 2006), 61–72. Rosamond McKitterick ([email protected]) is Professor Emerita of Medi­eval History at the Uni­ ver­sity of Cam­bridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, United Kingdom.

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the city’s foundation. He rejected the vulgata opinio that the city had been founded by Remus, brother of Romulus, as unlikely, and drew on his knowledge of Livy’s “History of Rome” (Ab urbe condita) to support his judgement. One thing that may have prompted the vulgata opinio was the relief sculpture of the twins Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf, the quintessential symbol of the city of Rome, on the underside of the arch. But Flodoard went on to say that the ancient Roman foundations of the city were clearly attested by the Roman Triumphal arch of Mars in Reims (the Porte de Mars in the present-day Place de la République to the east of the cathedral) that was such a dominant feature of the city’s landscape, and suggested that Reims might have been founded by members of Remus’s military retinue.2 The Porte of Mars in Reims happened, at 33 metres long and 13 metres high, to be the largest triumphal arch in the Roman Empire. One originally of four, each marking major entrances into the city, it was built between 180 and 230 AD. Flodoard’s understanding of its chrono­logy, seven centuries later therefore, was thus rather approximate. Nevertheless his remark in relation to the theme of the uses of memory and history is important; Flodoard actually rejected an alleged memory within the city in favour of an ancient written text. He then used a local monument and another set of memories about who had built it to confirm the antiquity of the city itself. Here the monument served its classic purpose as an object intended to recall a person or event.3 As a consequence the Gate of Mars in Reims then plays a role as a point of reference in Flodoard’s history as a whole. This was a narrative written within the conventions of the genre known as “deeds of bishops” (gesta episcoporum),4 but which created a particular memory of the church of Reims for his audience. In Flodoard’s text, the Gate of Mars represented an embodiment of the citizen’s memory of the city’s Roman past. It was an essential element of the city’s identity; Reims itself became a lieu de mémoire in the sense defined by the modern French historian Pierre Nora,5 and Flodoard’s narrative itself played a crucial role in the construction of the identity of the city of Reims and of its citizens. Flodoard’s work offers an instance, therefore, not only of the way in which different manifestations and uses of memory reflect elements of a people’s identity, but also of how an existing historical work, that of the Roman author Livy, written a thousand years 2  Flodoardus Remensis, Historia remensis ecclesiae, ed. Martine Stratmann, MGH SS 36 (Hann­over, 1998), 62; available online at www.mgh.de/dmgh/resolving/MGH_SS_36.

3  Moses I. Finley, “Myth, Memory and History,” in The Use and Abuse of History, ed. Moses Finley (London, 1975), 11–33, esp. 25–28. See also Alison Cooley, ed., The Afterlife of Inscriptions: Reusing, Rediscovering, Reinventing and Revitalising Ancient Inscriptions (London, 2000).

4  Michel Sot, Un historien Carolingien. Flodoard de Reims (Paris, 1996). See also François Bougard and Michel Sot, eds., Liber, Gesta, Histoire. Écrire l’histoire des évêques et des papes, de l’Antiquité au xxie siècle (Turnhout, 2009); Edward Roberts, Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century (Cam­bridge, 2019).

5  Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. in 7 (Paris, 1984–1992); Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York, 1996).



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before Flodoard’s own narrative, might be combined with local memories in order to create a new version of the past of Reims. The use of particular memories to reinforce an identity as well as to form the core of an historical narrative is the principal theme of this chapter but, as I indicated at the outset, the problems of evidence need to be considered as well. In many ways we constantly confront the outward manifestations of the uses of memory in the surviving written and visual evidence from the past, for so much of it was actually designed to assist memory in one way or another. Legal records are an obvious example.6 The problems of the evidence, and the possibility of invented memory, appear to become more acute the further back in time one goes. There are many types of evidence we could look at, but I shall concentrate here on two particular forms, namely, narratives and epitaphs, and offer you two case studies from the early middle ages. First of all I shall discuss the Frankish narratives about the conquest of the Saxons at the end of the eighth century and how much they demonstrate the manipulation of memory. Thereafter I shall take up another cue offered by Flodoard’s text, namely, commemoration and the role of a monument as a physical reminder or material embodiment of the past, and look at some of the epi­ graphic evidence from the early Middle Ages, and especially inscribed epitaphs on stone. Before that, however, it may be helpful to consider the topic of memory and the many issues it raises.

Memory and Invented Memory, Tradition and Invented Tradition

In thinking about memory and history, we need to bear in mind, first of all, the ways in which human beings actually remember things as a cognitive process, and how memory and recollection selects, distorts, and shifts over time, so that much can get forgotten or suppressed. Memory is visual, olfactory, aural, and cognitive. How many times, for example, can a particular smell evoke a place and then an event and the people involved, however impressionistically, or a particular noise bring an experience fresh to the mind once more. Secondly, there is interplay between oral, physical, gestural, and written agents in the formation of memory and this can affect the way in which memory is recorded and history is written. Thirdly, we need to think about the connections between individual memory and shared or collective memory. This is as true of our own contemporary world, and the weight that might or might not be given to the reports of eyewitnesses, as it is of any period in the past. Memory of the past is something we encounter all the time in our sources, but memories can be personal and collective, and they can be shaped and manipulated. Historians who study the use of particular memories to construct a past and to reinforce an identity or an ideo­logy, therefore, always have to consider the problems of evidence and the way in which ideas about the past have been communicated through written texts, whether as 6  Peter Erhart and Lorenz Hollenstein, eds., Mensch und Schrift im frühem Mittelalter (Sankt Gallen, 2006); and Peter Erhart, Karl Heidecker, and Bernhard Zeller, eds., Die Privaturkunden der Karolingerzeit (Dietikon, 2009).

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narratives or in the form of ostensibly objective historical and legal records, and all in very specific contexts. Although so much recent historical research on memory has been dominated by modern concerns, such as the terrible memories of crimes against humanity and genocide in the wars of the twentieth century, memory is by no means a modern preoccupation. We have to ask, therefore, whether the study of the uses of memory in the Middle Ages presents special problems, not applicable for other periods. Much of the work on processes and mechanisms of memory and record has in fact been done by medi­evalists, though this does not necessarily mean that such processes and mechanisms have no relevance for other periods.7 Modern historians have tended to distinguish between official archive-based versions of history and more popular personal and individual memories in diaries, letters, and records of oral conversations. Yet Jay Winter’s comment, in relation to the sites of memory and sites of mourning of the Great War, that historians focus on memory as a reflection of “a complex matrix of suffering, political activity, claims for entitlement, scientific research, philosophical reflection, and art,” can be applied to any period of the past.8 Prache Deshpande, on the other hand, in relation to the history of western India between 1700 and 1960, goes so far as to say that use of memory can highlight popular visions of the past that subvert dominant official commemoration.9 The idea that popular memories of the past might subvert official or state promoted commemoration and officially sanctioned records of memory needs further consideration in relation to the notion of social or collective memory. If individuals remember things, to what extent is it valid to talk about collective memory? For the social anthropo­ logist James Fentress and the historian Chris Wickham, “recalled past experiences and shared images of the historical past are the kinds of memories that have particular resonance for the constitution of social groups in the present.”10 This is, of course, an adaptation of Halbwach’s notion of the part shared or “collective” memory plays in the self-definition of a social group. Memories are one of what Frazer, in the context of early medi­eval Britain, has called structuring principles.11 Similarly, in early modern Germany, Jewish communities remembered and narrated their past and how memories of individuals or of past events could be invoked to teach lessons for the political present.12 7  Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medi­eval Culture (Cam­bridge, 1990); Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–1307 (Oxford, 1993); Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medi­eval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cam­bridge, 1992); Leo Treitler, “Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant,” The Musical Quarterly 60 (1974): 333–72.

8  Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European History (Cam­bridge, 1995).

9  Prache Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (New York, 2006). 10  James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992).

11  William O. Frazer and Andrew Tyrell, eds., Social Identity in Early Medi­eval Britain (London, 2000).

12  Dean Philip Bell, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community (Aldershot, 2007).



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In my own work on history and memory in the eighth and ninth centuries in western Europe, I have pursued the notion that historical narratives are statements about what people remember of the past as well as what they choose to forget. I explore the degree to which texts reflect collective memories, and the part a shared memory plays in the definition of a social group. I also take the notion of “shared” or collective memory to be something established by communication, whether oral or written.13 As the example of the Saxons invoked below suggests, the associated notion in the formation of collective memory we also need to embrace is the creation of accounts of past events that draw on memory but select from it in ways that become distinctive and thereafter shared by a group. Thus, although individuals remember things it is valid to talk about collective memory precisely because it is shared memory and, as it were, a pooling of individual memories. Memory cannot be divorced from its social and historical context. For the medi­eval historian, all that remains of any oral element is whatever has been recorded in writing. The interpretation of this written evidence for memory keeping and writing history has many technical elements, some of which I address later, but the role of the written evidence, and especially the historical writing from the early middle ages, as a representation of memory, formulated by an individual but shared with a group in such a way as to shape each member’s perceptions and interpretations of their own individual memories, is crucial. The questions that arise about the uses of memory in past societies, therefore, are inevitably closely linked with historians’ treatment of the evidence. Much of this evidence is arguably either the consequence of recorded memory or an attempt to provide a memorial of some kind. Both documents and historical narratives offer representations of a contemporary memory of reality. They are accounts of events, and people, and attitudes, and are powerful combinations of both objective and subjective interpretations of the past. We also find invocations of ancient traditions, like that made by Flodoard with whom I started, as if they are part of an active and living memory and preserved as such thereafter. The ways in which such written or material evidence are subsequently preserved, moreover, shape and structure memories of the past and determine their uses still further. To sum up the discussion so far, historical memory includes ideas and visions of the past invoked by members of a society generated by a variety of means, not least narratives. This prompts further questions: What might govern the process of selection and what collectively has been remembered? How can historians cope with official and public representations of memory? How has memory, collective and individual, influenced politics and how is the past used? To what degree does memory shape constellations of power?14 Are particular uses of the past peculiar to the Middle Ages? Even when the detail of such recorded memory can be established as manifestly false, the facts of its creation and use are important and valid historical evidence in their 13  Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cam­bridge, 2004), 1–5.

14  For a twentieth-century example see Jan-Werner Müller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cam­bridge, 2002).

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own right.15 The mode of transmission, moreover, is little affected by its truth; all that matters is that it was and should be believed. But what people remember, what they choose to remember, how they remember, what forms memory and commemoration take, and how these forms and these memories are used is very much more complex. The precise historical context is crucial. Let us now concentrate, therefore, on a precise historical context, namely, the period from the late eighth to the tenth centuries, with the possible distinctions between official and popular, collective and individual manifestations, manipulations and uses, of memory in mind.

Two Case Studies

We shall now look at narrative accounts concerning Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons, and then early medi­eval inscriptions and what this can tell about memory. The Construction and Use of Memory of the Saxons and the Saxon Conquest in the Late Eighth Century by Charlemagne16

Charlemagne, ruler of the Franks from 768 to 814, was the dominant ruler of most of Western Europe (that is, modern day France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and Northern Spain). Charlemagne and his brother inherited their father’s kingdom in 768 and from 771 Charlemagne ruled alone. Soon afterwards he embarked on what is presented in the narrative sources as a relentless and ultimately successful series of military campaigns against the Saxons to the east, pushing ever north towards and then beyond the Elbe river. The conquest of the Saxon territories was completed by 803, after over thirty years. I have singled out the year 782 for discussion. This is the story offered by the Royal Frankish Annals.17 In 782, Charlemagne set out on a military campaign, crossed the Rhine at Co­logne, and held a synodus at Lippspringe. All the Saxons save the rebel Widukind came to Charlemagne there, and there were also legates from Halfdan of the Danes (in the North) and from the Avars (in the East). The Saxons under Widukind rebelled but Charlemagne, unaware of this, sent an army of Franks and Saxons against some Slavs. En route the Frankish leaders of this army, Adalgis, Geilo, and Warin, heard about the Saxon rebellion so, without telling Charles, they diverted, went to meet the Saxons in the Süntel mountains, dealt with them successfully—it is described as it if it were a victory—and were killed. 15  Compare Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cam­bridge, 1983).

16  I draw here on Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cam­bridge, 2008), 29 and 103–6.

17  Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Lurissenses maiores et Einhardi, ed. Frederick Kurze, MGH SS rer. Germ. 6 (Hannover, 1895), 58–60; available online at http://www.mgh.de/dmgh/resolving/MGH_SS_rer._Germ._6.



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Charlemagne heard about this and sent another army of Franks

[…] The Saxons then assembled docilely, and subjected themselves to the power of the lord […] king, handed over the rebels to Charlemagne except for Widukind, who had fled to the Northmen.

The account continues in this matter-of-fact way:

[…] 4,500 Saxons were to be put to death, the sentence was carried out and when all this had been done the king returned to Francia.

Of course, one wonders about the degree to which this annal narrative is really a record of an individual’s memory, a collective memory, or a constructed memory which the author hoped was how this event would be remembered in the future. We need to register not only the action of the king’s generals and the very feeble way the Saxons purportedly behave, but also the shocking slaughter of so many Saxons. I shall come back to this. For now, this narrative account found in a text known as the Royal Frankish Annals needs more comment. The complete text offers a narrative of events from 741 to 829 and survives in four different recensions of the presumed “original” version, all made in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and called simply A, B, C, and D, plus a Revised or “E” Version. It is the most substantial, as well as the most influential, of the extant contemporary narratives for the history of the Frankish kingdoms under the early Carolingian rulers. The annals in fact form a powerful triumphalist narrative about the Franks and their rulers and the text’s influence can be traced throughout the ninth century.18 Each of the versions B to E has ninth-century manu­script witnesses and the distribution of extant copies indicates that the Royal Frankish Annals was disseminated right across the Frankish realm from Brittany to Bavaria.19 These annals are the closest thing to “official history” we have from the early Carolingian period and were written from a court perspective and perhaps even disseminated from the royal court.20 They may be, therefore, a neat illustration of the difficulty of maintaining the supposed distinction between official, archive-based history and personal memory. The text’s layout was innovative at the time, for it is laid out as entries for each year, 741, 742, 743, and so on, though it is generally agreed that these annals present a composite text: they were written in batches by a few anonymous individuals; they were not compiled on a year-by-year basis. The account for 782 is in the first of these batches, and thus within a few years of the event. Knowing all this, how happy can we about the way the Saxons are described, quite apart from the action of the king’s own men? In what way might this be invented memory, distorted memory rather than actual memory, designed to persuade readers and hearers of the text of this “official” history to remember the events and indeed to think about Saxons in a particular way thereafter, namely, as rebels, resistant to those bringing them political and cultural benefits and order? There are many other points in the 18  See McKitterick, History and Memory, 84–119.

19  McKitterick, History and Memory, 19–22.

20  McKitterick, History and Memory, 21–22; see also McKitterick, Charlemagne, 31–43.

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annals’ narrative when a reader might feel similarly suspicious or doubtful about what the annalists are relating, but it is difficult to find alternative versions of the stories. In the case of 782, however, there is at least one alternative, in the text known as the “revised” or E-version of the annals. This is the work of someone who went through the entire text of the Royal Frankish Annals, changing and adding bits all the way through to 801. Here are the two versions again, with the Reviser’s alternative version. The narrative can be divided into sections. I will deal with them in turn, comparing the versions, before drawing some conclusions. The first section simply adds some detail about the Slavs and Sorbs and the offices held by Adalgis, Gailo, and Warin: Charlemagne sends an army of Franks and Saxons against the Slavs

Royal Frankish Annals, 782: And immediately after [Charlemagne’s] return, the Saxons in their customary fashion, again rebelled, at the instigation of Widukind. Unaware of this, the lord king Charles sent his missi, Adalgis, Gailo, and Worad, to lead an army of Franks and Saxons against a few Slavs who had rebelled.

Revised version: After the assembly [in Saxony] had been concluded and [Charlemagne] had recrossed the Rhine into Gaul, Widukind who had taken refuge with the Northmen, returned to his homeland and stirred up the passions of the Saxons with vain hopes so that they rebelled. Meanwhile the king had received news that the Sorbs, Slavs who inhabit the lands lying between the Elbe and Saale, had invaded the territories of their Thuringian and Saxon neighbours to plunder them and had ravaged some places, robbing and burning.

He immediately summoned three of his officers to his presence, Adalgis, the chamberlain, Gailo, the count of the stables, and Worad, the count of the palace, and ordered them to act with all possible dispatch, taking Eastern Franks with them to repress the temerity of the contumacious Slavs.21

The Revised version then adds a long account of the encounter with the King’s kinsman Theodoric and how Adalgis, Gailo, and Worad ignored his advice: Notice about a Saxon rebellion

Royal Frankish Annals, 782: The above named missi heard while they were on their way that the Saxons had rebelled.

Revised version: After they had crossed into Saxony to carry out their orders, these men heard that the Saxons, thanks to Widukind’s scheming, were ready to make war on the Franks, and they abandoned the route by which they had been intending to advance against the Slavs and marched at speed, with the east Frankish troops towards the place where they had heard the Saxons had gathered. They were joined in Saxony by count Theodoric, a relative of the king, with as many troops as he had been able swiftly to gather in Ripuaria on hearing of the Saxons’ rebellion. His advice to the hastening legates was that the scouts should first ascertain, with all pos-

21  For the Latin text of both versions see Annales regni Francorum, ed. Kurze, 58–64. See also Paul David King, Charlemagne. Translated Sources (Kendal, 1987), 81–82 and 116–17 for all the English translations cited here.



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sible speed, where the Saxons were and what they were up to, and that then, if the nature if the terrain allowed, he and they should make a joint attack upon them. His advice was thought admirable, and they advanced with him as far as the Süntel mountains, as they are called; the Saxon’s camp lay on the northern side of these.

After Theodoric had set up camp there, they crossed the Weser, as agreed with him, so that they could get around the mountain more easily, and established their own camp on the bank of the river. It was their fear, however, when they discussed matters among themselves, that if they had Theodoric with them in the battle the renown for the victory would be transferred to his name, and they therefore resolved to engage the Saxons without him.

Unlike the original version of the battle, the Reviser presents it as a disaster: Disastrous battle between Saxons and Franks

Royal Frankish Annals, 782: When they collected the above-said scara together they rushed upon the Saxons, without informing the lord king Charles of what they were doing. They joined battle with the Saxons and the Franks, fighting gallantly and killing many Saxons, emerged as victorious.

Revised version: Each individual seized his weapons and charged with as much speed as he could muster, just as fast as his horse would carry him, upon the place where the Saxons were drawn up in battle array in front of their camp; they acted as if their task were to pursue a fleeing foe and seize booty rather than take on an enemy standing marshalled to face them. Since the approach had gone badly, the battle went badly as well for when this was joined they were surrounded by the Saxons and killed almost to a man. Those who were able to make their escape even so fled not to their own camp, from which they had set out, but to Theodoric’s, across the mountain.

The author is very specific about who died, as if to reinforce the impression of calamity: Frankish deaths

Royal Frankish Annals, 782: And two of these missi, Adalgis and Gailo, fell there, in the Süntel mountains, as they are called.

Revised version: The loss to the Franks was greater than numbers alone, however, for two of the legates, Adalgis and Gailo, four counts, and as many as twenty other men of distinction and nobility were killed, as well as others who were in their followings and chose to die at their sides rather than survive them.

The king then arrives to conduct an enquiry: Charlemagne’s enquiry

Royal Frankish Annals, 782: When the lord king Charles heard this, he advanced there with as many Franks as he had been able to gather hurriedly together and arrived at the place where the Aller flows into the Weser. Then all the Saxons once again assembled and subjected themselves to the power of the lord king.

Revised version: When the king received news of what had happened, he judged that there must not be a moment’s delay; swiftly collecting together an army, he entered Saxony and questioned the primores of the Saxons, all of whom he had summoned to attend him, as to who was responsible for the rebellion which had taken place.

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And once he has heard the Saxons’ response, Charlemagne orders the execution of four and a half thousand rebels and, in an added detail evoking a gruesome image, they are beheaded all on one day: The execution of the Saxon rebels

Royal Frankish Annals, 782: they handed over the evil doers—with the exception of Wudkind who had escaped by flight to Nordmannia—bearing the greatest responsibility for that rebellion, 4,500 in number to be put to death. And this sentence was carried out.

Revised version: And since they all declared that Widukind was the author of this wickedness but were unable to deliver him up in view of the fact that he had taken himself off to the Northmen once the deed had been done, no fewer than 4,500 of the others who had fallen in with his promptings and committed such a gross outrage, were handed over and at the palace on the river Aller called Verden, at the king’s command, all beheaded on a single day. Thus was punishment executed.

Not only is this a disastrous defeat and outcome: there is a stronger moral tone and elegiac element for the fallen (led astray by their disobedient leaders). There is also again more emphasis on the personal role of the king himself. In this version, moreover, the slaughter of the Saxons is presented far more clearly as a reprisal. The amount of added detail, moreover—the offices held, which Franks died, who said what, the manner of the Saxons’ death—gives the impression, or is designed to give the impression, of being closer to the recollections of someone who was there, and who was attempting to put the record straighter. I find the inclusion of the king’s kinsman Theodoric in the story particularly interesting as a possible hint about the expected audience for this narrative, but there are also, of course, the parts of the story that are confirmed, not least the king calmly going back to one of his palaces, at Thionville on the Moselle River, for Christmas. Charlemagne goes home for Christmas

Royal Frankish Annals, 782: When all this had been done with, the lord king returned to Francia. And he celebrated the Lord’s birthday at the villa called Thionville, and Easter likewise. And the count of the years changed to 783.

Revised version: and the king then returned to winter quarters at Thionville, where he celebrated both the Lord’s birthday and Easter in the customary fashion.

Does this “E-version” represent the incorporation of individual memory into the earlier official narrative? Given that so far everyone has assumed that this version was written twenty years after the event, has it a commemorative as well as political function? Why was it now possible to acknowledge this incident as a defeat? Does the fact of its insertion also serve to corroborate the effectiveness of the circulation of information and the network of Frankish communications at the end of the eighth century? A further consideration is whether this story got recorded in any other contemporary source? There are, for instance, the many “minor” or local Frankish annals. They survive in single manu­scripts from the ninth century that can rarely be precisely located. Some can, and do, reflect local perceptions and memories of the past, but that is another story.22 22  See, for example, Rosamond McKitterick, Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Notre Dame, 2006), 63–89, some of the arguments of which I summarize here.



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Few of these local accounts, however, mention the events of 782 in any detail and the number of Saxons executed is not mentioned, though the Moselle annals at least note that as a consequence of a rebellion, Charlemagne went back into Saxony and with cruel sword struck down an immense multitude of Saxons. By the time we reach Einhard’s account, written in his famous Life of Charlemagne between 814 and 817,23 the misfortunes of the Saxons are entirely their own fault. Einhard says nothing about the great slaughter in 782 but expresses the view that the wars would have been over much sooner had it not been for the Saxons’ faithlessness. Finally, he comments: when all those who were in the habit of resisting had been crushed and brought back under his control, he [the king] removed ten thousand men who had been living with their wives and children along both sides of the Elbe river and he dispersed them here and there throughout Gaul and Germany in various [small] groups. […] Thus that war which had lasted for so many years ended on the terms laid down by the king, that they could take up the Christian faith and unite with the Franks in order to form one people.24

In addition to the forced relocation of the Saxons, apparently in 804, Einhard also adds a crucial interpretative gloss and ultimate justification for the Saxon wars: the Christianization of the Saxons and their becoming one people with the Franks. By the late ninth century a curious development can be noted in a Saxon source, the epic poem about Charlemagne written by the Poeta Saxo or Saxon poet. This is essentially a versified version of the Royal Frankish annals but contains a number of interesting variations, mostly to highlight the Christianization of the Saxons. In other words, Einhard’s interpretation has become the dominant theme. Thus for 782, the year of Widukind’s rebellion and the terrible slaughter of 4,500 Saxons at Verdun, the Poeta Saxo simply comments that after meting out this punishment the “greatest of kings” returned to Thionville. Other killing and destruction by fire and sword is presented as an incidental means for the procuring of a people for the new faith. In his lament on the death of Charlemagne in Book V, the Poeta Saxo reiterates his praise of Charlemagne at length for bringing the Saxon people to the Christian faith.25 23  For a justification for this early date see McKitterick, Charlemagne, 7–20.

24  “[O]mnibus qui resistere solebant profligatis et in suam potestatem redactis, decem milia hominum ex his qui utrasque ripas Albis fluminis incolebant cum uxoribus et parvulis sublatos transtulit et huc atque illuc per Galliam et Germaniam multimoda divisione distribuit. Eaque conditione a rege proposita et ab illis suscepta tractum per tot annos bellum constat esse finitum, ut abiecto daemonum cultu et relictis patriis caerimoniis Christianae fidei atque religionis sacramenta susciperent et Francis adunati unus cum eis populus efficirentur.” Cited from Einhard, “Vita Karoli”, ed. R. Buchner, in Die Reichsannalen / Leben Karls des Grossen, Einhard / Zwei Leben Ludwigs / Geschichten, Nithard, ed. O. Abel et al., Quellen zur karolingischen Reichsgeschichte 1 / Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 5, ed. Reinhold Rau (Darmstadt, 1955; repr. 1974), 174–76 (chap. 7); English translation: Paul E. Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier. The Complete Einhard (Peterborough, Ont., 1998), 20–21. 25  Poetae Latini aevi Carolini (iv), ed. Paul von Winterfeld, MGH Poetae 4,1 (Hannover, 1899), 70–71; available at www.mgh.de/dmgh/resolving/MGH_Poetae_4,1.

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If we go still later, into the tenth century and the history of the Saxons by Widukind, again we find that the only point he wants to make about Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons is that he converted them to Christianity, partly by teaching and partly by war, and thus made the Saxons not only the brothers and friends of the Franks, “as we can now see,” but Franks and Saxons became one people, bound together by the Christian faith.26 If these figures in the annals and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne—of four and a half thousand Saxons executed and ten thousand driven into exile—for events only twenty years apart are in any way accurate, at least to the scale of the killings and deportations of Saxons as a people, we have here what might in the modern world be regarded as genocide. But very little survives by way of a record or memory of this, except in the manner presented by the Poeta Saxo and continued by Widukind. The little archaeo­ logical evidence surviving from Saxony suggests a pattern of dispersed village settlements and farmers, with no major concentrations of people at all, many regional groupings, and a diversified social structure greatly disrupted by the Franks’ invasions. None of the battles and campaigns recorded suggests more than a few hundred people involved. Even so, the slaughter of a large number of young male warriors would have had a catastrophic effect on the population and on the economy. But of all this the sources say nothing. The Saxons are reported as merely matters with which Charlemagne dealt with his customarily ruthless efficiency, along with all the other issues to which he turned his attention. Very occasionally in later years there are records of the next generation being compensated for things done to their parents. In 813, for example, Charlemagne restored confiscated property to a Saxon noble: Asig was confirmed in the possession of lands lost by his father Hiddi the Saxon. Other charters offer further details that seem to represent snippets of individual memories of the land, vacated by Saxons when they were forcibly relocated, but then granted to Charlemagne’s own men. Thus in 811 Charlemagne confirmed Count Bennit’s ownership of land given originally to his father Amalung for his fidelity. These charters were carefully preserved; both survive in their original form.27 The saving of the original documents represent again both local and royal acknowledgement of the events also recorded in the narrative histories. Some inkling of the social upheaval and opportunities afforded to members of elite groups to assert their social and political status is also offered by a revolt, known as the Stellinga revolt, also crushed, in Saxony later in the ninth century.28 26  Widukind, “Res gestae Saxonicae,” in Quellen zur Geschichte der sächsischen Kaiserzeit, ed. Albert Bauer and Reinhold Rau, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 8, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt, 1977), 44.

27  Pippini, Carlomanni, Caroli Magni Diplomata, ed. Engelbert Mühlbacher, MGH DD Kar. 1 (Hannover, 1906), 284–85 and 290–92; available at www.mgh.de/dmgh/resolving/MGH_DD_ Kar._1 28  See Eric Goldberg, “‘Popular Revolt, Dynastic Politics and Aristocratic Factionalism in the Early Middle Ages’: The Saxon stellinga Reconsidered,” Speculum 70 (1995): 467–501; and Ingrid Rembold, Conquest and Christianization: Saxony and the Carolingian World, 772–888 (Cam­bridge, 2017).



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If we relied only on the annals, the apparently deliberate omission of the Saxons’ experience at the expense of a catalogue of Frankish success is a selective use of memory to fix a particular event’s overall significance. Yet there is another form in which different memories of the Saxons were retained. Two royal capitularies, the form in which Charlemagne issued his legislation, and specifically designed for Saxony, dated 782/785 and 797, in effect frame the main phases of conquest. The provision of a written form of the Lex saxonum, already in a form greatly influenced by such Frankish codes as the Lex Ribuaria, followed a few years afterwards, ca. 802.29 A similarly meagre survival is apparent for the Saxon capitularies. That for 782/785 is only extant in a manu­script produced in Mainz ca. 825, which also contains the capitulary for 797. The latter was copied in the newly founded monastery of Corvey in Saxony in the tenth century and preserved for posterity in a compilation that included the Lex saxonum and the early charters of the monastery.30 With hindsight, the first capitulary, even if not as early as 782, appears somewhat premature in its assumption that control had now been established and could be enforced. The decisions this capitulary records have become notorious in modern scholarship for the uncompromising nature of the insistence, often on pain of death, on receiving baptism, the observance of Christian practices, abandoning of pagan rites, paying tithe for the support of the churches and the clergy, and respect for the Christian church. Emphasizing or even exaggerating the paganism of the Saxons possibly reflects an underlying Frankish strategy of defining Saxons as pagan enemies in order to justify the Franks’ treatment of them. Even contemporaries doubted that the fierce enforcement of tithe payments was the most productive way to proceed as far as a process of joyful conversion to a new faith might be concerned. Alcuin’s protest about too vigorous a pursuit of conversion fourteen years later, however, so often repeated in relation to this capitulary, can hardly be understood as more than a general comment in the context of the slow advance of Christianization. Nevertheless, it reflects a memory of Frankish treatment of the Saxons belied by the annals.31 Yet the capitulary of 782/785 also brought administration on Frankish lines to the newly-conquered territories; it promised order, with counts and priests together ensuring the proper administration of justice, and the possibility of appealing to the king himself. It even permitted certain aspects of Saxon custom to be maintained.32 29  Gerhard Theuerkauf, Lex, speculum, compendium iuris. Rechtsaufzeichnung und Rechts­ bewußtsein in Norddeutschland vom 8. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (Co­logne, 1968), 38–97. 30  See Hubert Mordek, Bibliotheca capitularium regum Francorum manu­scripta: Überlieferung und Traditionszusammenhang der fränkischen Herrschererlasse (Munich, 1995), 769–71 and 378–86.

31  In Epistolae Karolini aevi (ii), ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Berlin, 1895), 157–59; available at http://www.mgh.de/dmgh/resolving/MGH_Epp._4.

32  Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Alfred Boretius, in MGH Capit. 1–2, 2 vols. (Hannover, 1883), 1:68–70 (in 26. Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, for access to the king, capitularia 2 and 26; for

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All the same, in 782, or even in 785, Charlemagne had only conquered a portion of the land. The second Saxon capitulary, on the other hand, issued specifically in relation to an assembly at Aachen on October 28, 797, refers to the Saxons from various districts, Westphalians, Angrarians, and Eastphalians, and the Bortrini and the “northerners” (septentrionales), whose customs and the need to preserve them, are invoked at the end of the capitulary.33 The Saxon hostage list of ca. 803 records how particular Saxons were held in custody by specified Frankish bishops, such as Haito of Basle, and counts, such as Count Hitto, possibly for as long as two decades.34 The Poeta Saxo confirms this division of Saxons into Westphalians, Eastphalians, and Angrarians at least, though this most probably represents only some of those lumped generically together as Saxons in the Frankish sources. An important aspect of all these different sources, all carefully preserved as memorials and records of particular kinds, is that they retain the memory of the Saxons, even if divided into regional groups, as a people, after they were united with Franks, and stress the ideo­logical importance of their conversion to Christianity. The acknowledgement of a different category of Saxon Law, the later ninth-century insistence on the origins of the Saxon people by Rudolf of Fulda, on the Saxons as a group of three different Saxon tribes by the Poeta Saxo, and again the history of the Saxons by Widukind from the tenth century are all important indications of this. Indeed, there is a greater insistence on their ancient memory as crucial for their sense of identity, whereas more immediate events such as the Frankish conquest are passed over speedily.35 Inscriptions

Historians for the most part are bound to concentrate on the surviving written evidence of the memory and thus record keeping and historical composition of any group in the past like those I have discussed so far. But this does not mean we should not also consider monuments, like the Gate of Mars in Reims, and their resonance as embodiments of a collective memory designed for the future. Rather than discuss monuments and statues, however, I want to consider for my second, much briefer, case study a category of evidence that is both monument and text, namely, inscriptions. priests and counts, capitularia 29–31 and 34; for the Saxon law penalties to be used for perjurers see capitulare 33).

33  Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Boretius, 1:71–72 (in 27. Capitulare saxonicum, capitularia 1 and 11).

34  Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Boretius, 1:233–34 (115. Indiculus obsidum saxonum moguntiam deducendorum). See also Christoph Stiegemann and Matthias Becher, eds., 799 Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit: Karl der Große und Papst Leo III. in Paderborn, 3 vols. (Mainz, 1999), 1:327–28. See also Matthias Becher, “‘Non enim habent regem idem antiqui Saxones…’. Verfassung und Ethnogenese in Sachsen währen des 8. Jahrhunderts,” in Sachsen und Franken in Westfalen. 799 Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit, ed. Hans-Jurgen Hassler (Oldenburg, 1999), 1–31.

35  For a discussion of Rudolf of Fulda’s Translatio sancti Alexandri as a prime instance of this see Ian N. Wood, “Beyond Satraps and Ostriches: Political and Social tructures of the Saxons in the Early Carolingian Period,” in The Continental Saxons from the Migration Period to the Tenth Century: An Ethno­graphic Perspective, ed. Denis H. Green and Frank Siegmund (Woodbridge, 2003), 271–86.



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Early medi­eval inscriptions need to be looked at in the context of commemoration of the dead. Epitaphs inscribed on stone might seem to have a straightforward use, simply as grave and memorial stones put up to preserve the memory of an individual following a practice labelled as “the epi­graphic habit” by ancient historians.36 So they do, but in addition they tell us a great deal about the individuals who raised the epitaphs. It used to be assumed that the raising of epitaphs on inscribed stones, so important an aspect of social custom in Roman antiquity, died out in the early Middle Ages. But a corpus of no fewer than 4,198 inscriptions from Gaul and Spain dated between 300 and 750,37 and a very large number of inscriptions from early medi­eval Italy,38 as well as an ever growing amount of material from the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries and later, such as the Carolingian epitaphs from France and Germany being steadily recovered and expounded by Continental scholars, makes it clear that many communities throughout the Carolingian empire raised inscriptions to commemorate their dead. Treffort, for example has been able to document 183 new eighth- and ninth-century inscriptions from excavations over the past twenty years in France alone.39 The wholesale destruction of Carolingian buildings in the Gothic period from Suger’s day onwards, together with the fragmentary nature of Treffort’s evidence, suggest that an enormous amount has indeed been lost. At the very least our certainty about the Carolingians’ loss of the epi­graphic habit is undermined. Epitaphs inscribed on stone were put up to preserve the memory of an individual, but they, and the “epi­graphic habit” they document, witness to an extraordinary faith in both the present effectiveness of the inscription and its longevity: quite simply, they were made to last. Memory, recorded in what was understood to be indelible writing, was harnessed by the living to serve particular social and political aims. One example is the remarkable group of Carolingian epitaphs produced by the local lay elites and secular clergy in the Frankish mint town of Melle, which display what have been described as a distinctive approach to the letter forms and texts of the inscriptions and a taste for literary creativity and poetic turns of phrase. Not only is there the evidence of the stones themselves, but their production suggests workshops able to produce these carved inscriptions, craftsmen able to earn a livelihood thereby, and 36  Ramsey MacMullen, “The Epi­graphic Habit in the Roman Empire,” American Journal of Philo­ logy 103 (1982): 233–46; and Elizabeth Meyer, “Explaining the Epi­graphic Habit in the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 74–96.

37  Mark Handley, Death, Society and Culture: Inscriptions and Epitaphs in Gaul and Spain AD 300–750 (Oxford, 2003). See also Wendy Davies et al., eds., The Inscriptions of Early Medi­eval Brittany / Les inscriptions de la Bretagne du haut moyen âge (Oakville, CT, 2000). 38  Nicolette Gray, “The Palaeo­graphy of Latin Inscriptions in the Eighth and Ninth centuries in Italy,” Papers of the British School at Rome 16 (1948): 38–170; and Nicholas Everett, Literacy in Lombard Italy, c. 568–774 (Cam­bridge, 2003), 235–76.

39  Robert Favreau, “La mémoire du passé dans les inscriptions du haut moyen âge,” in Ideo­ logie e pratiche del reimpiego nell’alto medioevo (Spoleto, 1999), 937–79; Robert Favreau, Les inscriptions médiévales (Turnhout, 1979); Robert Favreau, Épi­graphie médiévale (Turnhout, 1997); Cécile Treffort, Mémoires carolingiennes. L’épitaphe entre célébration mémorielle, genre littéraire et manifeste politique (milieu viiie début xie siècle (Rennes, 2007).

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the social acceptance and support of such a practice, that is, a continuation of the “epi­ graphic habit.” They thus reflect some of the social expectations of the time as well as the social structures that made the erection of such stones possible. The public display of an inscribed epitaph creates and imposes a shared memory on all who see it as well as being a physical embodiment of the deceased and a visible focus for remembrance and mourning. Inscribed stones can preserve the memories of entire communities. The formulae themselves, like all inscribed epitaphs, also tell us something about the attitudes to death and the role of the individual in the community. Of a woman called Adalberg who died in 830 and was buried at Saint-Oustrille du Château in Bourges, for example, the inscription simply records that her body lies here and expresses the hope that her soul will have rest. Of Emno, in the same cemetery, it is said that “He quit the world while still a child but merits a place in the celestial city.” Of Amalgarius we are told: “Here lies Amalgarius of blessed memory who strove to be pious in his life”; of Gaudberga the inscription proclaims that “The earth reclaims Gaudberga, buried according to the rite; she tried to be pious.” A similar inscription for Eldegarius records his death in old age and requests prayer for his soul.40 These publicly displayed inscriptions, a very visible part of the landscape when first raised, preserve the memory of the dead. Many also transmit to posterity the names of those who commissioned the work as well as of those who died. Many ask those who see the inscriptions for their prayers and refer, often obliquely, to the vanity of the world. Thus they offer a short sermon to the faithful. Commemoration is also a form of inspiration from the past. Memory and particular forms of commemoration can, especially of individuals known for their heroism, generosity, skill, or religious convictions, provide models of behaviour. Some of the stones have a liturgical function in recording the dedication of a church or the translation of relics. Attitudes to life, death, and faith are all revealed.41 Apart from surviving inscriptions carved on stone, many epitaphs are preserved in epitaph collections, as much for their poetic merits as for the memory of the individuals commemorated in manu­scripts. A ninth-century manu­script in the Vatican, Vat. Pal. Lat. 833 originally from the Rhineland abbey of Lorsch, for example, contains four such collections.42 Given that the original stones have in most cases disappeared, these records 40  “[Emmo] qui meruit sistere in arhe poll; hic requiescit Amalgarius [bone memoriae] qui studuit vitam semper abere piam; clauditur oc gremium Gausberga rite sepulta qui studuit vitam semper abere piam; ic requiescit Eldegarius nomine qui in aetate senectutis migravit a seculo ac moriendo petiit corpus eius humo, pro cuius anime omnes nos precemur Deum.” Cited from Françoise Jean, Olivier Ruffier, “Les plates-tombes inscrites de saint-Outrille-du-Château à Bourges (Cher),” Cahiers Archeo­logiques 34 (1986): 33–74; and Treffort, Mémoires carolingiennes, 149, 193 and 293. 41  Cécile Treffort, L’église carolingienne et la mort: christianisme, rites funéraires et pratiques commemoratives (Lyon, 1996).

42  Carmela Vircillo Franklin, “The Epi­graphic Sylloge of BAV palatinus latinus 833,” in Roma magistra mundi. Itineraria culturae medi­evalis: Mélanges offerts à Leonard Boyle à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1998), 975–90. On another collection, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 2832, see Mark Handley, “Epitaphs, Models and Texts: A



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become all the more precious of course; but their further significance is to witness how memory can be preserved in relation to particular types of text and in particular types of manu­script compilations. The evidence of memorial inscriptions needs to be considered beside that of a new genre of text developed in Carolingian Europe, the Libri vitae. These names were gathered together from many religious communities across the Frankish empire in special books. The Liber memorialis from Reichenau, for example, contains approximately forty thousand names. These lists of names, referred to, or even recited in, the liturgy, the format of the lists, and inclusion or exclusion of certain individuals could sometimes record the memory of political change and misfortune, albeit in a rather oblique way. A more straightforward example is the memorial to men preserved in the Liber memorialis of Remiremont, killed resisting a Magyar invasion at the beginning of the tenth century.43 These formalized and extensive series of lists of the dead and living for the purposes of prayer and commemoration, collected from many religious communities across the Frankish empire in these books created in the late eighth and the ninth century, and often continuing in use until late in the middle ages, were powerful vehicles of memory. They preserve the memory not just of individuals but of whole communities, and played an important role in consolidating a sense of identity.44 Rather than relying only on memory or on oral confirmation by liturgical recitation of the names involved, the books themselves became the monuments. These Libri vitae and necro­logies that first begin to appear in manu­scripts in the eighth century have sometimes been thought to have acted as a substitute for inscriptions, and to mark the beginning of different and less “public” forms of commemoration in writing in early medi­eval Europe. The Carolingian epitaph evidence to which I referred above suggests, on the contrary, that a continuing “epi­graphic habit” coexisted with the Libri vitae in the Carolingian world. That is, rather than regarding Libri vitae or the necro­logies as replacing inscriptions, with all the change in social attitudes about the public display of writing that that might imply, new forms of commemoration in written texts in manu­scripts were introduced in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries. This represents an elaboration of the literate conventions of memory within Carolingian society rather than a reduction.45 These books were supported, moreover, by creative liturgical, textual, and musical compositions, and by public as well as private ritual relating to the commemoration of the dead. There is no neat chrono­logical scheme or geo­ graphical pattern of one memorial system being replaced by another. These Libri vitae Carolingian Collection of Late Antique Inscriptions from Burgundy,” in The Afterlife of Inscriptions: Reusing, Rediscovering, Reinventing and Revitalising Ancient Inscriptions, ed. Alison Cooley (London, 2000), 47–56. 43  Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, cod. 10, fol. 57v.

44  Full details concerning the Libri vitae are to be found in McKitterick, History and Memory, 156–85. 45  An elaboration of this argument is to be found in Rosamond McKitterick, “The Uses of Literacy in Carolingian and Post-Carolingian Europe: Literate Conventions of Memory,” in Scrivere e leggere nell’alto medioevo (Spoleto, 2012), 1–33.

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were additional media of commemoration and complemented stone inscriptions and memorials. Different forms of commemoration may well have been associated primarily within particular groups in early medi­eval society—whether the audience for historical texts, the people forming the bonds of association created by the Libri Vitae, or the communities who chose to erect monumental inscribed stones in their local cemeteries.

Conclusion

All these examples, whether of texts written on parchment or inscribed on stone monuments, witness to how sources survive and why, and how critically historians have to engage with what they have in order to make sense of the past. Death and memorials form mnemonic moments for society, and physical objects can be one of the chief vehicles for the transmission of memory. The examples I have discussed represent public forms of remembrance and commemoration, the manipulation of memory, the selectiveness of memory, and the consequent highlighting of certain aspects of the past. Let me return to a question I raised at the beginning of this chapter concerning official and unofficial, collective and individual memories. All these forms of remembering, or contexts for the creation, structuring, and preservation of memory, have something to tell us about the past, not least when it becomes clear that a great deal may have been deliberately suppressed as well as simply forgotten.46 Saxon identity was maintained, even if a large part of Saxon experience at the hands of the Franks seems never to have been articulated in a form that has survived. The people mentioned on the tombstones are remembered as part of the social fabric. They witness on stone to the role of memory in connecting the living and the dead and have a continued place in the society of the living. This small sample of particular forms and functions of memory- keeping and commemoration from the early Middle Ages may help to illuminate other uses of memory for the construction of the past in the ancient, later medi­eval, early modern, or modern worlds.47

46  On strategic forgetting, see Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994).

47  Earlier versions of this chapter were presented to the Crayenborgh Honours Class 2008 in the Uni­ver­sity of Leiden, and to the German Historical Institute in London in 2009. I am grateful to my audiences on both occasions, as well as to that in Lleida in 2011 for thoroughly interesting questions and comments, and especially to Lisette Mierop, Carolina Lenarduzzi, Jean-Marie Stam, Danelle van Zyl in Leiden, Andreas Gestrich, Director of the German Historical Institute, and Flocel Sabaté in Lleida. For the Leiden students’ own contributions see Lisette Mierop, Carolina Lenarduzzi, Jan M. Stam, Dirk van Zyl, Memory, Oblivion, History. Essays from the Crayenborgh Honours Class 2008, Universiteit Leiden (Leiden, 2008).

Chapter 4

CHARTER WRITING AND DOCUMENTARY MEMORY IN THE ORIGINS OF CATALAN HISTORY MICHEL ZIMMERMANN

My focus here lies at the crossover or, rather, the convergence of charter analysis

and cultural history. What I plan to show is how cultural history, in this case historio­ graphy—etio­logical narrative rooted in a quest for origins—is immersed in charter writing and the memory it perpetuates. However, notarial writing and the construction of historical discourse are two very different areas which, although they are not radically opposed, affect fields of epistemo­logy and memory that have no real connection with one another. For this reason, it is essential to agree on the terms used and the nature of the material they designate, providing them with a precise meaning linked to the purpose of their usage. Far from attempting to discover an essential connection, resulting from scriptural homo­logy, between documentary writing and the creation of historical discourse, I wish to identify and analyze a relationship which initially had nothing to do with fate or necessity. This unusual position is the substance of my approach: a causality of coincidence, a genesis woven in pure temporality, which undoubtedly represents an original feature of Catalan history. On one hand, we have a purely material, utilitarian, and accounting phenomenon, merely legal and, in all cases strictly individual. This was the precursor of notarial writing at a time of private deeds: in other words, the transcription and written preservation of the transactions and rituals of everyday life (donations, purchases and sales, notices of pleas, records of the consecration of churches, and so on). The important point here was to ensure they were memorized by providing an immediate, simultaneous transcription of the contracted commitment, for which the written document gave legal significance. I would like to place this in diachronic symbiosis, on the other hand, with a strictly cultural phenomenon involving memory: the writing of history with a desire for intelligibility and a true reconstruction of the past. The two phenomena are, by nature, different if not contradictory. One is an operation of record in the context of a practice of preserving memory for the future and the other is an operation of returning to the past. One is an operation of private, painstaking, and immediate transcription of reality in a record; the other deliberate detachment with discursive intent integrating it into a general view. The mutation is radical: the status of the text moves from the material / isolated / utilitarian / legal (such as a transfer of ownership) to the conceptual / general / reflexive / cultural. Michel Zimmermann ([email protected]) is Emeritus Professor of Medi­eval History at the Uni­ ver­sité de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France.

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After these general considerations to put our research in context, it is important to describe precisely the material on which it is based and identify what, in the original charter documents, could lie at the origin of the historio­graphical discourse. Catalan documents from the tenth to thirteenth centuries are not fundamentally different from other sets of contemporary documentation, but they show a number of specific features to support our arguments. The clearest is their abundance, undoubtedly a result of chance in terms of their preservation but, above all, showing a real taste for writing presented, under recurring reminders, from the Visigoth Code, as condition and irrefutable proof of the “reality” of a transaction: “Because it is ordered that the laws be applied in all the cases contained in the scriptures […]. Because the law has to be applied in all cases that are contained in the scriptures.”1 As for the breadth and formal quality of the documents, these clearly vary depending on the importance attributed to the issues involved and the parties to the transaction, but they share the same purpose, which may be legal (transfer of property, memorization of a judgement, or liturgical ritual) or eschato­logical (since, for instance, a donatio ecclesiae provides a special route to salvation). The historical context of the creation of Catalan documents is their second original feature. It corresponds to what we might basically call the “birth of Catalonia,” in other words its “liberation” following Carolingian intervention and its gradual emancipation from Frankish power which certain ideo­logues or politicians have, rather imprudently, labelled “political independence.”2 Over the decades, events took place that were destined to form the matrix in which the founding myths of a Catalan identity would be rooted (government of Wilfred and the heredity of the counts’ crown; the sack of Barcelona by Al-Mansur in 985; hesitation in recognising the Robertian “usurpers”; cessation of all relations with the Frankish court after the accession of Hugh Capet; regrouping of the southern Pyrenean counties in the hands of the Barcelona family; union with Aragon, and so on). Finally, a last characteristic must be underlined: the freedom in the writing of documents in the tenth to twelfth centuries, not so much in the form, subject to the stereotypes for each category, but in the writing and form of composition. We are still in the pre-notarial period of private deeds when those drawing up these records were scribes (scriptor, qui hoc scripsit […]) freely chosen for their competence, who were in fact often professional charter writers. What gives “authority” (auctoritas) and legal value to the written document (scriptura, itself sometimes called auctoritas) is not the quality of the writer or the person in charge of the operation of writing, or even the person in whose name it is written (using the first person), but the very forms of the writing, chiefly the presence of underwriters or witnesses whose marks give auctoritas to what until then 1  “Quia decretum est legibus ut scripturae intercurrant in omnibus causis […]. Quia lex precepit ut in omnibus causis scripture intercurrant.” On this subject, see Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (ixème–xiième siècle), 2 vols. (Madrid, 2003), esp. 1:10–22.

2  In 1988, the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia) celebrated the “millennium of the political independence of Catalonia.”

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had been a simple transcription of a statement or gesture.3 Within the stereotypical context of charter forms, whoever is in charge of drawing up a document (the “author” or scriptor) is allowed real freedom of writing, which varies, of course, depending on the importance or purpose of the document itself. In this respect, it is legitimate to wonder why certain types of document are resolutely resistant to all creative desires, while the content of others opens up considerable space for seeking rich, innovative expression. The choice of personalized forms of writing corresponds first of all to pragmatic concerns: the importance recognized in the transaction justifies resorting to a protocol that encourages “free” writing. But the taste for writing shown by private deeds is not reduced merely to concern for legal effectiveness or memory. In a society valuing writing, where there are many who boast of knowing how to write or regret being incapable of doing so, the concern for effective memorization of the events of everyday life has its own stylistic or literary consequences: the choice of a varied and original vocabulary, the proliferating use of adjectives and descriptive or discursive sequences, the identification of synonyms, the emergence of vernacular language, and so on. The drawing up of a document becomes a true exercise in writing, including developments with no direct link to the operation mentioned in it. The scriptor inserts philo­logical or semantic comments, channels his inventories in topo­logical itineraries or alternative possibilities. He makes the content of the charter the result of moral or eschato­logical considerations, themselves backed up by a citation from Scripture. He can also abandon himself to more specific and contextual appreciations or allusions (considerations concerning the difficulties of the times or the famine gripping the land, etc.) and he may not shy away from venturing into the field of political current affairs or history. It is not possible to assign a precise starting point to this concern for writing, as it appears from the oldest documentary evidence, immediately following the Frankish “liberation,” after the gap in documents corresponding to the Visigothic period, but it is clear that its beginning lies during a period of notarial “deconstruction.” The intensification of the phenomenon at the end of the ninth century and its increasing spread to the end of the eleventh century coincide with the expansion of the mass of documents that have come down to us. However, we must consider it as a whole, without wishing to distinguish stages other than those characterized by the nature of the literary concerns for which it provides a vehicle. We therefore repeat that we must guard against generalization: the most numerous and most widespread documents (donations, sales, exchanges) avoid all creativity because they fall within strict stereotypes. The importance of literary “adornment” distinguishes a hierarchy of documents which goes beyond their individual legal impact to highlight their moral and collective significance. In a completely different cultural space, the period from the tenth to the twelfth centuries was marked by the birth of a Catalan historio­graphy which was exhaustively 3  Michel Zimmermann, “Genèse de l’écriture,” in Écrire et lire en Catalogne, 1:113–70; Michel Zimmer­mann, “Affirmation et respect de l’autorité dans les chartes,” in Les actes comme expression du pouvoir au Haut Moyen Âge, ed. Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean and Benoî�t-Michel Tock (Turnhout, 2003), 215–40.

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analyzed not so long ago by Miquel Coll i Alentorn,4 following the pioneering work of Ferran Valls i Taberner.5 The first preserved evidence of historical writing in Catalonia goes back to 939. It is a Chronique des rois francs written by Gotmar, Bishop of Girona, and dedicated to the Caliph Al-Hakam, which has come down to us in an Arabic version included in the Praderas de Oro by Al-Massudi. It is a royal genealogy going back to Clovis (Chlodio), a strictly utilitarian document used for dating deeds. But it is certainly not the first of its kind composed in Catalonia, as the updating of a genealogy means the disappearance of previous versions. Much more interesting for our purpose are the chrono­logies or royal genealogies appearing in the second half of the eleventh century and preserved in large numbers. These are simple aide-memoires preserved in manu­scripts where they accompanied collections of documents and helped scribes date or read deeds. Historians of Catalonia generally call them “chronicles” because they are often associated with or incorporated in annals, or themselves incorporate annalistic notes. Despite their dryness, they undoubtedly express a “political” view of relations between the Catalan counties and the French royal family. We will have the chance to revisit this later. To take just one example highlighting the connection with the drawing up of practical documents, the reign of the “usurper” Rudolph (923–936) is clearly identified as a sequence of monarchical vacancy: “this land was without a king for seven years; after his death, there was no king for eight years; it was seven years without a legitimate king, during which Rudolph reigned.”6 As we have mentioned, genealogy appears as a historio­graphical sketch enriched, following the royal successions, with the attachment of annalistic notes commemorating the important events in Catalan history and still further by the incorporation of these same notes in the genealogy itself, interrupting the ordinary successions. Before the middle of the eleventh century, such treatment is given to only two episodes, both from local history: two parallel episodes with contrary significance—the liberation of Barcelona by Louis the Pious in 801 and the capture of the city by Al-Mansur in 985. The former is included to celebrate the reign of the Frankish king. So, in Skokloster’s Chronicle, after the reigns of Pepin and Charlemagne, is written: “His son Louis reigned for thirty-three years and conquered Barcelona.” The mention can come earlier, introducing the royal genealogy: “in the year 839, reigning Lord Charles Emperor, year 34 of his reign (he reigned 47 years and 3 months), his son Louis entered Barcelona, and expelled from 4  Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “La historiografia de Catalunya en el periode primitiu,” Estudis Romànics 3 (1951–52): 139–96; available online at http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/ER/article/ viewFile/37649/48274. 5  Ferran Valls i Taberner, “Els inicis de la historiografia catalana,” in Obras selectas, 4 vols. (Barcelona, 1955), 4:1–14; and subsequently reedited as “Els inicis de la historiografia catalana,” in Ferran Valls i Taberner, Matisos d’història i de llegenda (Zaragoza, 1991), 108–19.

6  “Fuit ipsa terra sine rege annos VII; post ejus obitum non habuerunt regem per annos VIII; fuerunt anni VII sine legitimo rege, in quibus regnavit Radulfus.” Cited from Josep Rius, ed., Cartulario de Sant Cugat del Vallès, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1945), 1:44–45; See Michel Zimmermann, “La datation des documents catalans du ixème au xiième siècle: un itinéraire politique,” Annales du Midi 93, no. 154 (1981): 345–75.

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there all the Saracen people. Here he reigned for 24 years.”7 This prominent position is justified because it is precisely the incorporation of Barcelona into the Carolingian empire that imposed the need for “Frankish” dating of Catalan documents. In a way, in the eyes of later centuries, this marks the beginning of Catalan history. Other chronicles respond to this preface to Catalan history by mentioning what amounted to a temporary epilogue to it: the sack of 985. This is also mentioned in its place, during Lothair’s reign: “33. Lothair son of his. In the year 31 of his reign Barcelona was seized and destroyed by the Saracens.”8 We will deal with the consequences of the abrupt appearance of the disaster in the genealogical succession later. For less utilitarian purposes, the Catalan chronicles (of which the oldest to come down to us dates from the twelfth century) already include historio­graphical writing. They are annals—collections of annalistic notes preceded by a date and following one another in chrono­logical order. I propose to show how this elementary historio­graphy—genealogies enriched with annalistic notes or universal annals—was destined to be completely and utterly renewed with contributions from “notarial” documents which are, a priori, radically foreign to it both in their purpose and their form of composition. The richness of charter writing contributes to the emergence of a new historio­graphy written on the basis of a local perception of history. Without attempting to establish a causal relationship between the two phenomena, one can only be struck by the coincidence of the new richness of the paratextual or contextual adornment of charter writing, its roots in the long period of written memory, and its decisive contribution towards the renewal of historio­graphy. How could the writing of these documents have promoted the memory of events that have nothing to do with the content of diplomas and charters, events which, detached from their original medium, have formed the basis for historical discourse? How could collective and cultural etio­logical or ideo­logical memory have taken root in individual memory concerned with property? Our research will be developed by examining three periods in turn.

7  “Lodoicus, filius eius, annis XXXIII [regnavit] et ipse cepit Barchinonam; Era DCCC XXXIX, regnante Domino Karolo Imperatore, anno ordinationis suae XXXIV, (Regnavit annis XLVII, mensibus III) intravit Ledovicus filius ejus in Barchinonam, expulso inde omni populo Sarracenorum. Qui regnavit annis XXIV.” Cited from Enrique Flórez, ed., “Chronicon Barchinonense II,” in El estado antiguo de la Iglesia Ausonense, hoy Vique, ed. Manuel Risco, España sagrada. Teatro geográficohistórico de la Iglesia de España 28 (Madrid, 1774), 328–34; available online (search-string: “El estado antiguo de la Iglesia Ausonense”) at https://bibliotecadigital.jcyl.es (screens 358–64).

8  “Leotarius, filius eius XXXIII. Anno autem XXXI regni eius capta est et destructa a Sarracenis Barchinona.” Cited from Miquel Coll i Alentorn, ed., “El cronicó de Sant Cugat,” Analecta Montserratensia 9 (1962): 245–59.

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The Appearance of Extra-Textual Data in Catalan Documents: The Gradual Spread of Political Comment Alongside the legal and factual context that led to them being drawn up, and beyond stylistic and termino­logical renewal, the concern for writing shown by the large number of documents encouraged the insertion of more informative details as contextual adornment or moral exhortation. The content and its importance originally corresponded to pragmatic purposes: reminders of the law or evangelical precepts gave greater effect to recommendations written in the document and the prestige attached to quoting an authority made them easier to remember. If we ignore devices in documents for setting out the clauses of the transaction or reciting a liturgy explaining why it has been drawn up, extra-textual information is inserted in two elements of the protocol in particular: the preamble and the eschatocol, particularly the dating formula. The preamble, which gives the reasons why the document has been drawn up and invites respect for its clauses, and the dating formula, which places the act in sequenced and relative time corresponding to the reign of a sovereign, also often draws heavily on formulae. However, it can be almost entirely independent of the text when it includes developments that have only a distant connection with the content of the document. Preambles represent the most appropriate spaces for including associated or contextual developments. In an article in Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, I spent time disentangling their “cultural meaning.”9 From very early on, their content focused as a priority on the imperative memory of the Visigothic Code, which required the preservation of the written memory of transactions and rituals. A preliminary quotation from the Lex Gothorum introduces the document, even before the initial protocol: “It is established in the old rules, and decreed in the Gothic laws, that those who agree to swap contracts must write the agreement, in order that their wishes become confirmed and corroborated as a single will.”10 These explicit reminders of the law may be followed by some relevant but banal sentences of common wisdom: “because what is registered in writing is better than what is confided to the memory.”11 Over the years, Catalan documents were enriched with other preambles, with moral or eschato­logical impact. The legal imperative gives way to theo­logical teaching, often reduced to a quotation from Scripture. Church donation documents, as for any almsgiving, are particularly elaborate, with a preamble inviting the faithful to generosity through a strategy of exchange between gift and recompense. The legacies of the faithful 9  Michel Zimmermann, “Protocoles et préambules dans les documents catalans du xème au xiième siècle. É� volution diplomatique et signification culturelle. II. Les préambules,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 11 (1975): 51–79. 10  “Est in antiquis regulis statutum et in Gotorum legibus decretum est ut inter commutantes gesta scripturarum intercurrant quatenus illorum voluntates uno animo confirmentur et corro­borentur.” From Barcelona, Arxiu de la Ciutat de Barcelona, Diversorum C (a), n. 28 (January 25, 972). 11  “Quoniam ea quae scripta notantur melius memoria commendantur.” Cited from Jaime Villa­ nueva, Viage literario a las iglesias de España, 22 vols. (Madrid, 1806), 5:269 (December 11, 1178).

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become the property of the poor but, for the giver, they bring remission of sins and the promise of salvation. Everyone who is shown to have committed many serious crimes must be placed in correction through alms to Christ. This is the holy and good advice that we hear from him when he says: “Give alms and then all things are clean for you.”12

I consider it of great importance and it is most pleasing to see the house of God built there and contribute to it with my goods that I grant, so that the preaching of the holy fathers can be heard, because alms free the soul from death and I am conscious of the important stain of sin, waiting to be accepted by divine mercy so that God be pious and merciful with my sins.13

The use of formulae—first of all the famous Ripoll formula, preserved in the rich MS 74 of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon and which was exceptionally widely used until the twelfth century—14 does not paralyse the creativity of scribes, who can enrich or cut the formulae at will, replacing parts with equivalent expressions or synonyms. A new stage begins in the last decades of the tenth century when writers of preambles do not hesitate to free themselves from the hitherto conventional themes of legal reminders or invitations to salvation as they turn towards more historical or contextual content. The presence of historical allusions in practical documents may be older: it could arise from evoking the origin of goods or the conditions of their acquisition or transfer, notably with mentions of aprisio from the time when the country was subject to the authority of the Franks is mentioned. The expression “ditio Francorum” (sub ditione Francorum)15 is reused several times. The documents are also sprinkled with incidental formulae giving reminders that the organization of society and the institutional structures providing a framework for it are subject to Frankish authority. There are countless allusions to royal precepts (per preceptum regis, in istos preceptos de regali donacione), and, more rarely, to royal donations (per donitum regis) or to the institution of the monarchy (per institutionem regis francigeni). Until the end of the tenth century, documentary memory is royal memory. In donations and sale documents, reference to the royal precept is a real sign of the age of the property being sold. This can provide reasons 12  “Omnis homo qui se cognoscit multis criminibus esse faece forditatum, pervigil debet esse qualiter per eleemosynam Christum possit placere. Sanctum et salubre consilium ab eo meruimus audire dum dicit: ‘Date eleemosynam et ecce omnia munda sunt vobis.’” Cited from Pierre de Marca, Marca hispanica sive limes hispanicus, hoc est geo­graphica et historica descriptio Cataloniae, Ruscinonis et circumjacentium populorum ab anno 817 ad annum 1258, ed. É� tienne Baluze (Paris, 1688), col. 1056 (appendix, document 211) (December 28, 1034).

13  “Magnum mihi et satis licitum esse videtur domum Dei hedificare ubique et de meis rebus honorare atque concedere, audiente me predicacionem sanctorum patrum, quia helemosina a morte liberat anima, cognoscentem me peccati macula honustum, compunctus divina pietate ut pius et misericors sit Deus in peccatis meis.” From Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, MS 74 (from Santa Maria de Ripoll), fol. 151r: a model-formula for a donatio ecclesiae.

14  Michel Zimmermann, “Un formulaire du xème siècle conservé à Ripoll. É� dition critique,” Faventia 4, no. 2 (1982): 25–86.

15  Michel Zimmermann, “Aux origines de la Catalogne. Géo­graphie politique et affirmation nationale,” Le Moyen Âge 89, no. 1 (1983): 5–40.

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for inserting a historical mini-recitation recalling the circumstances of the grant, but mentions generally remain allusive and isolated. In exceptional cases, they begin a more conceptual discourse based on the theme of “liberation.” Catalan documents are rooted in a clearly defined historical sequence: the time of the Franks.16 Special attention should be paid to church consecration documents,17 a genre which is spontaneously and frequently mentioned: the occupation of land and changes of settlement; the name and origin of the builder; pagan presence and Christian conquest; the destruction and restoration of the sanctuary; and so on. The perspective is notably different—more historical and more didactic—than the one governing more general documents. One such document has great importance—that of the third consecration of Santa Maria de Ripoll, the work of Miró Bonfill, on November 15, 977.18 Historians see the long preamble, which gives a history of the abbey, founded by Wilfred in 888, and is written in an affected style using abstruse termino­logy full of Hellenisms, as the oldest piece of Catalan historio­graphy (it has been spoken of as an “act of birth”). Starting with the history of building the abbey, in effect it offers a history of Catalonia, in this case as a territory abandoned to the sovereignty of the counts descended from Wilfred. This story is a local variant of universal history—the Christianization of the world. The count and patrician Wilfred, having chased out the Saracens who had occupied and cultivated the deserted land under the aprisio system, built the monastery of Ripoll: Wilfred stands out, of lasting record, count and, to tell the truth, patrician loved by his subjects, powerful baron due to his nobility, who flourished in an unmistakeable way by the strength of his virtue. After expelling the Muslims who were then established and inhabiting the empty land through aprisio, as was the custom, he built, among other religious buildings, the monastery of Ripoll in honour of the Holy Virgin Mary.19

16  Michel Zimmermann, “Naissance d’une principauté: Barcelone et les autres comtés catalans autour de l’An Mil,” in Catalunya i França meridional a l’entorn de l’Any Mil / La Catalogne et la France méridionale autour de l’An Mil, ed. Xavier Barral i Altet, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Anscari Manuel Mundó, Josep M. Salrach and Michel Zimmermann (Barcelona, 1991), 113–35.

17  On the acts of consecration of churches in Catalonia, see Michel Zimmermann, “Les actes de consécration d’églises du diocèse d’Urgell (ixème–xiième siècle): la mise en ordre d’un espace chrétien,” in Le sacré et son inscription dans l’espace à Byzance et en Occident, ed. Michel Kaplan (Paris, 2001), 301–18; Michel Zimmermann, “Les actes de consécration d’églises. Construction d’un espace et d’un temps chrétiens dans la Catalogne médiévale (ixème–xiième siècles),” in À la recherche des légitimités chrétiennes. Représentation de l’espace et du temps dans l’Espagne médiévale (ixème–xiiième siècle), ed. Patrick Henriet (Lyon, 2003), 29–52; Michel Zimmermann, “La consécration des églises en Catalogne aux xème et xième siècles. Une territorialisation de la foi,” in Le Moyen Âge dans les Pyrénées catalanes. Art, Culture et société. À la mémoire de Mathias Delcor, ed. Michel Zimmermann et al. (Canet, 2005), 65–85. 18  On the third consecration of Santa Maria de Ripoll, see Michel Zimmermann, “La Catalogne,” in Les sociétés méridionales autour de l’An Mil. Répertoire de sources et documents commentés, ed. Michel Zimmermann (Paris, 1992), 248–55. 19  “Vuifredus extitit comes atque, ut verius fatear, subditorum carus patricius, vir nobilitatis titulo pollens, virtutum vigore immarcessibiliter vernans; qui inter cetera ecclesiarum aedificia, expulsis agarenis, qui tunc temporis colones extiterant, more per prisiones desertam incolens terram, coenobium Ripollense beatae virginis Mariae honore construxit.” Cited from Marca, Marca hispanica, col. 917 (appendix, document 123).

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This presentation of history in two parts (a “pre-historical” period of obscurity and barbarism followed by the time of Wilfred and his “expansion through veneration” [vene­ randa propago]) is not merely simplistic, it has clear ideo­logical and political content. The exaltation of the dynasty, and above all Wilfred, who is solely responsible for the “liberation” of the country, legitimises the counts’ sovereignty by ignoring the Carolingian episode. The only allusion to Frankish royalty in the course of the tumultuous evocation of the work done by Wilfred’s successors involves the incidental and exotic mention of a decree requested from the basileus Louis (a more than discreet allusion to a charter from Louis IV in 939): “constituted by a privilege from the apostolic see, which was requested by king Ludovic.”20 Ripoll made the counts appear the only central figures in a story which is, first and foremost, the beginning of an eschato­logical document. The political significance of this statement alone is enough to explain why the act of consecration of 977 should have been quickly incorporated into the Ripoll formulary and offered as a model formula for the consecratio ecclesiae. Nevertheless, the 977 document remains an aporia in terms of its wording: the ideo­ logical boldness of Miró Bonfill contrasts with the docile conformity of contemporary documents. Like the evocation of the “time of the Franks,” the repeated allusions to “liberation” from the Carolingians underline a clear political reality: the incorporation of what was to become Catalonia into the Carolingian realm, a dependent status formally recognized in dated documents which was characteristic of charter protocols. Exclusive dating of the documents by the years of the reigns of Frankish sovereigns certainly represents the origin of an historical and political awareness that gradually runs through the deeds themselves. The other space in the text suitable for inserting associated or contextual information is the final protocol; more precisely the dating formula. Historians are struck by the exclusiveness in this matter affecting all documents in Catalonia from the very earliest times.21 Dating based on the Incarnation, such as the Hispanic use of the Christian era (which remains in use in the rest of the peninsula), is not followed. Immediately after the Frankish conquest, Catalan practice moves radically away from that of Hispania. The phenomenon has a clear political meaning: the Carolingian “liberation” and incorporation of the Catalan counties into the Frankish world involves the recognition, included in the form of dating documents, of allegiance to the Frankish authorities. This practice is merely a technical translation of a political contingency. There is no exception to the exclusive use of Carolingian royal dating. The formulae stick closely to the dynastic succession which they record without delay, after rooting it with the coronation date. This demonstrates the unswerving legitimism of the local populations. In the last two decades of the ninth century, there was a clear shift. The changes of royal succession are immediately taken into account and the legitimism of the Catalans

20  “Privilegia apostolicae sedis constituentes, decretum quoque basilei Lodoici expetentes.” Cited from Ramon Ordeig, Catalunya Carolingia, iv. Els comtats d’Osona i Manresa (Barcelona, 1999), 2:894. 21  Zimmermann, “La datation des documents,” 345–75.

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invites them to take sides in succession disputes. The phenomenon appears with the “usurpation” of Eudes in 888, which disorients the scribes because they do not know the reasons for it. They assimilate it to a period of royal absence which they deplore either by beginning a posthumous calculation from the reign of Charles the Fat and rejecting any authority other than that of Christ—“the second year after the death of the emperor Charles, reigning Our Lord Jesus Christ, while we await the king from His generosity”;22 or by provisionally relying on an absolute chrono­logy based on the Incarnation, which appears as a substitute calculation—“Year of the Incarnation of the Lord 888, in the month of December, day 15, reigning Christ, awaiting that he gives us a king”;23 or by combining the two systems. Until 890–891, the “recognition” of Eudes was hedged with multiple precautions: an appeal to parallel dating, the use of unusual vocabulary, and more. Although after 891 his reign was no longer the subject of dispute and the royal lists recorded him without reticence following Charles the Fat (e.g., “Oto, annis X”), Eudes marks a definitive rupture in the form of dating documents, which never again showed the same uniformity. By beginning a new approach to calculation, Eudes’ reign gives the dating of Catalan documents a clear political slant: choosing a form of dating means taking a position. Faced with the successive dynastic interruptions represented by the Robertian reigns, the scribes posthumously extend the reigns of Carolingian sovereigns—“in the fifth year since Charles died” (anno V quod Karulus obit) (934); stigmatizing a royal absence which is filled in by the reign of Christ— “reigning Christ, hoping for a king” (Christo regnante, rege sperante) (930), “God reigning, king awaiting” (Deo regnante, rege expectantem) (934); or ignoring the usurpation by re-establishing the legitimate dynastic succession beyond the unexpected “nonroyal” parenthesis: “year 16 reigning Charles king, son of Louis, after the death of Odo” (a. X°VI° regnante Karulo regem, filio Ludovici, post obitum Odone) (913), “in the first year reigning king Louis, son of Charles, who died” (anno I regnante Leodevico rege, filio Carlo rege, qui obit) (936).24 Particularly suggestive in this regard is the way Catalan documents treat the reign of Rudolph following the deposition and imprisonment of Charles the Simple. The dating of the documents simply ignores the fate of the Carolingian and the years of his now fictitious reign continue to punctuate the documents. The fiction of the Carolingian’s reign cannot, however, be prolonged beyond 929, the year Charles the Simple died. Rather than accept the usurper, the scribes resign themselves to extend their dating by the years of the posthumous reign of the Carolingian until 936—“in the fifth year since king Charles died” (anno V quod Karulus rex obit) (934)—even completing this with reminders of the fact that they were waiting for a king: “in the fifth year since king Charles 22  “Anno II° quo mortuus est Karolus imperator. Regnante Domino nostro Ihesu Christo, nobis autem expectante rege ab ipso largitore.” From Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, parch. 8448; Cited from Marca, Marca hispanica, col. 821–822 (appendix, document 49) (March, 889).

23  “Anno ab incarnatione Domini DCCCLXXXVIII, in mense Decembrio, die decimo quinto, Christo regnante, dono ejusdem rege expectante.” Cited from Marca, Marca hispanica, col. 820–22 (appendix, document 48) (December, 888). 24  Zimmermann, “La Catalogne,” 248–55.

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died, reigning God, awaiting king” (anno V quod obiit Karolus rex, Deo regnante, rege expectantem) (934).25 Catalan scribes are unanimous in characterizing the seven years separating the death of Charles the Simple and that of the illegitimate victor as a period of vacancy. It is in these terms that it is classified in several royal lists used as calendars by notaries and archivists. While the majority of them simply ignore Rudolph, moving without transition from Charles the Simple (who is given a reign of thirty-three years!) to Louis IV, the catalogue preserved in Sant Cugat MS 47 explicitly mentions, after the reign of Charles: “after his death seven years passed without a legitimate king during which Radulf reigned.”26 In some cases, the dating formulae, above all the introductory dating of a document, are the most forthright, providing an appreciation of the contemporary political situation to ensure the promotion of local dynasties. Along these lines, they surreptitiously incorporated allusions to the count’s government: “in the first year after the death of the king Odo, in the times of the lord Borrell, count son of the deceased Wilfred, was nominated with the same name.”27 The formula suggests that the usurpation and death of Eudes has opened the way to the emancipation of the County of Barcelona. More explicit is a document from 904 in which Wilfred II accumulates hyperbolic descriptions in a clearly dynastic approach: “In the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ 894, resident in the worship of God the very illustrious and venerable baron Wilfred by the grace of God, count and marquis, son of the deceased marquis Wilfred.”28 It is with the accession of Hugh Capet in 987, following tragic events that marked the lives of the people of Barcelona for a long time, that the dating of documents can be considered a true political declaration and the rejection of the sovereignty of a person who is specifically denounced as a usurper: “reigning Hugh the Great king and awaiting Charles, with whom we maintain the link.”29 Most often, the denunciation is made ironically: the scribes deign to date their documents using the years of the reign of someone who is no more than a parvenu duke— “reigning Hugh who was [had been] the first duke” (regnante Ugone rege qui dux fuit [erat, fuerat] pridem); “who had been duke before” (qui antea fuit dux); “reigning Hugh, duke or king” (regnante Ugo duce vel rege), “reigning Hugh, duke and king” (regnante 25  Zimmermann, “La Catalogne,” 248–55.

26  “Post cuius obitum fuerunt anni VII sine legitimo rege, in quibus regnavit Radulfus.” Cited from Rius, Cartulario de Sant Cugat, 1:44–45. An analogous formulation appears in a catalogue transcribed by É� tienne Baluze (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds Baluze, t. 69, fol. 55): “After his death there was no king for eight years” (Post ejus obitum non habuerunt regem per annos VIII). 27  “In anno primo quo obiit Odo rex, tempore domni Borrelli comitis filii condam Vuifredi eiusdem nominis nuncupati.” From Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds Baluze, t. 107, fol. 116r. 28  “Anno Incarnationis Domini nostri Jesu Christi D°CCC°XC°IIII°, residente Dei cultore illus­ trissimo viro atque venerabile Wifredo, Dei gratia comite et marchione, filii quondam Guifredi marchioni.” Cited from Rius, Cartulario de Sant Cugat, 1:4–6 (document 2) (April, 904). 29  “Regnante Ugo Magno rege et Karllo expectantem qui est in vinculo (995).” Cited from Zimmermann, “La datation des documents catalans du ixème au xiième siècle,” 360.

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Ugo duce et rege)—, a duke/king whom they deliberately assimilate with his father, Hugh the Great, the illustrious duke of the Franks: “in the second year reigning Hugh the Great” (anno II regnante Ugo magnus); “reigning Hugh the Great or king” (regnante Ugo magnus vel rex); “in the seventh year since Hugh the Great has begun to reign” (anno VII quod Ugo magnus regnandi sumpsit exordium); “in the third year reigning Hugh the Great king” (anno III regnante Ugo magno rege); even to the point of not knowing his name: “in the first year of the reign of the king of the Franks whose name is unknown to us” (anno primo regni regis Franchorum ignotus nomine nobis).30 Other scribes restrict the royal status of Hugh and then of Robert to a precise territory, limited and far away: “France, in the first year reigning Hugh, king in France” (Francia: Anno I regnante Ugone […] regem in Francia); “in the first year reigning Robert, king in France” (anno I regnante Radberto rege in Francia); “in the first year since Robert began to reign as king in France” (anno primo quod cepit regnare Rodberto rege in Frantia), “in the seventh year reigning Robert king, who claims to be the king of France” (anno VII regnante Ragneberto rege impetrante Francia).31 The promotion of the term Francia in political termino­logy undoubtedly corresponds to a concern to delimit the space of royal authority. Royal authority, above all when exercised by a sovereign of disputed legitimacy, becomes a territorial and almost an alien power. By reigning elsewhere, the king allows space for other sovereignties. Following a practice begun by Borrell, certain documents integrate mentions of the local count into their dating and almost take things a step further by talking about his “reign”: “in year 12 reigning Robert, reigning the count William” (regnante Rodiberto anno XII, regnante Guillermo comite); “in year 17 reigning king Robert, son of the deceased Hugh and being count Ramon, for the grace of God count and marquis” (anno XVII regnante Roberto rege filium condam Ugoni et c. Raimandus gratia Dei comes marchisus).32 As simple calendars and catalogues of kings, Catalan annals also maintain the living memory of the excitement aroused in Catalonia by the “revolution of 987”: “after Hugh reigned, who had previously been duke and who had been raised to the royal position, and reigned in France ten years. After his death, his son Robert reigned, who sent Charles to the prison, with his offspring, who was of the royal lineage.”33 Documentary evidence of the uproar calms down, however, with the establishment of the new dynasty, and Catalan scribes renew their habit of dating their documents with the years of the reigns of Frankish sovereigns. Although from the years 1015–1020 the dating of Catalan documents no longer gives any critical appreciation concerning sovereigns, this is however because the power of the Capetians has now become entirely foreign. The return to “normal charters” is, moreover, far from being exclusive and from now on includes simultaneous dating based on the Incarnation. It coincides with the 30  Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne, 343–44.

31  Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne, 343–44. 32  Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne, 343–44

33  “Postea regnat Ugo, qui antea fuerat Dux, et subrepsit locum regiminis, et regnat in Francia annis X; Post ejus obitum regnat filius ejus Rodbertus, et tradidit in carcerem Karolum filiosque suos, qui erat de stirpe regia.” Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds Baluze, t. 69, fol. 55.

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ending of all forms of political relations between the Catalan counts and the Frankish court and, above all, with the sudden and final disappearance from the documents of any allusion to the “time of the Franks” or any mention of the praecepta or institutio francigeni regis, a recurring reminder of the legal foundation of social organization which used to be included in the wording of earlier documents. Beyond their technical role in the validation or justification of a document, preambles and dating formulae often offer us an engaged or critical view of the world, with the gradual emergence of current affairs in charter writing. The situations they portray for us are that of political and institutional development, the distancing of the monarchy, and the affirmation of the dynasties of counts, as clearly expressed by Rovira i Virgili: “Actually, the denial of recognizing the king who ruled was nothing more than a convenient screen behind which particular aspirations had free passage [...] in practice, these formulae led to the second attempt of independence.”34 Disorder in the royal succession on several occasions offered the Catalan counts the opportunity to raise themselves to the rank of absent sovereign, claim sovereignty of divine origin, and offer themselves as an alternative to royal failure. The perspective remains that of continuity and substitution. Faced with absent monarchs, the counts of Barcelona were called on to take over from the Carolingian sovereigns. But the sovereignty claimed in the documents is more of a declaration than reality. It takes an eschato­logical viewpoint: the passing of authority from Frankish kings to local counts is part of a liberation movement and of continuing confrontations with the Saracens, where counts are called on to make up for the absence of the sovereigns. Eschato­logy is the basis for history in general and Catalan history in particular, from now on taken over by the sovereign counts. Another episode was to give this claim for sovereignty the chance to take root in time and construct its own autonomy.

The Turning Point of 985 and the Insertion of Historical Memory in Charter Writing

The end of the millennium and, more precisely, the years 985–988, represents a decisive stage in the construction of Catalan historical memory. These years would later appear as the true founding date of “national” activity, to the point where the Generalitat de Catalunya, seeking clear, uncontroversial information, undertook to celebrate a thousand years of the “political independence” of Catalonia in 1988. 988 ends a four-year cycle marked by a turbulent political situation when various series of events interfered with one another. However, in historio­graphical terms, it is 985 that appeared as the year of foundation; a year marked by a disaster that was undoubtedly not as important as contemporary historians generously claimed: 34  “El refús de reconèixer el rei efectivament regnant no era sinó un paravent còmode darrera el qual les ambicions particulars tenien el camí� lliure […] en la pràctica, aquestes fórmules portaren la segona intenció de la independència.” Cited from Antoni Rovira i Virgili, Història nacional de Catalunya, 8 vols. (Barcelona, 1922–37), 3:261.

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986 was a miserable year for Barcelona, as the most calamitous and disturbing event recorded in its history, at least in the past thousand years, happened in our city. We refer to the defeat of Christians and the taking and destruction of Barcelona.35 It can rightly be said that the entry of Almanzor’s army was the direst event recorded in the history of Barcelona, at least in the past thousand years.36

How did this local event, which has left minimal archaeo­logical trace and was above all marked by the victors, been promoted to the rank of a major historical episode? Let us briefly recall the facts. After several decades of peace, relations between the Caliphate of Cordoba and the Iberian Christians sharply deteriorated in 981 when AlMansur, the true master of Cordoba after the death of the Caliph Al-Hakam, decided to punish the Castilians and Navarrese for the aid they had given his rival Ghalib and proclaimed holy war against the peninsula’s Christian principalities. Having taken and devastated Zamora and Simancas, he forced the King of Leon, Bermudo II, to submit and accept the presence of an army from the Caliphate. The Catalan counts who, through a series of embassies, were gradually becoming vassals of the Caliph, did not escape the Hajib’s reprisals. In 985, Al-Mansur launched a new expedition—the twenty-third of his “reign”—this time against Catalonia. He left Cordoba on May 5 and on Wednesday July 1, he besieged Barcelona after having surprised Borrell’s troops who had come out to meet him. On Monday, July 6, the city was taken by force and set alight, its inhabitants killed or taken into captivity. The Caliph’s armies did not spend long in Catalonia. After ravaging the surroundings of Barcelona, particularly the abbeys of Sant Pere de les Puelles and Sant Cugat del Vallès, they recrossed the Ebro with booty and prisoners. Even though it was followed by other raids in 1001 and 1003, the sack of 985 cannot have led to a long gap or even an important slowdown in trade between Catalonia and Cordoba.37 It remains a local event with limited scope, which may appear dramatic because of its unforeseen suddenness, but which had insignificant political consequences. The tragic, but at the same time rather irrelevant, nature of the event is illustrated by the misfortune of a certain Ramio who, a few years earlier, had drawn up his will before going to Cordoba (“he wanted to go to Cordoba, city of the Saracens”). Having returned safe and sound, he was killed in 985 by his former hosts.38 35  “Any malestruch per Barcelona fou lo 986, per ocorre en nostre ciutat lo fet mes calamitos y perturbador que registra la sua historia, almenys de mil anys ença. Volem dir, la desfeta dels cristians y presa y destruccio de Barcelona.” Cited from Francesc Carreras, “Lo Montjuich de Barcelona,” Memorias de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 8 (1901): 199–450, esp. 307. 36  “Amb raó pot dir-se que l’entrada de l’exèrcit d’Almançor és el fet més calamitós que registra la història de Barcelona, almenys de mil anys ençà.” Cited from Rovira i Virgili, Història nacional de Catalunya, 257.

37  About the taking of Barcelona in 985, see Michel Zimmermann, “La prise de Barcelone par Al-Mansûr et la naissance de l’historio­graphie catalane,” in L’historio­graphie en Occident du vème au xvème siècle: Actes du Congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur, Tours, 10–12 juin 1977 (Rennes, 1980), 191–218.

38  “Volebat pergere ad Cordoba urbem Sarracenorum.” Cited from Rius, Cartulario de Sant Cugat, 1:142–44 (document 171) (December 4, 985).

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It is at a material and legal level—concerning the preservation of urban memory and the everyday operation of Barcelona society—that the consequences of the raid appear to have been disastrous and lasting. The fire affecting public buildings led to the loss of archives and property titles. The exile in Cordoba of many prisoners paralysed social life, suspended the handing over of inheritances, and saw houses left empty and fields abandoned to turn fallow. It is no surprise that the documents should record the catastrophe immediately and that it should be preserved long in the memory until the material and social consequences had been erased. It is given pride of place in 1058, three quarters of a century after the event. During the period, more than forty documents explicitly make reference to it, all of ecclesiastical provenance. While Al-Mansur’s raid did not lead to any political upset or military extension, the consequences of the episode in terms of administration and property are developed spectacularly in the Catalan documents for entirely legal and technical reasons. The capture of Barcelona also features in notarial documents; in donations, sales, and wills, consciousness of a collective destiny is juxtaposed with individual considerations. From September 7, 985, two months after the raid, a document recording a donation to the abbey of Sant Cugat del Vallès refers to the sack of the city as if it were a familiar chrono­logical benchmark: “like that of the land we received from our fathers, which was in the city of Barcelona and he died there when that city was devastated by the Saracens.”39 It is important to date this chrono­logical information precisely. Documents preserve the memory of an event and the flurry of texts explains the renaissance of writing after the fire in the city. “On the 8th Ides of July he entered to protect the city, with other inhabitants of that county in those times, as the city was taken and held by the Saracens,” as one document states from a few months later.40 But the habit is perpetuated and the dating becomes increasingly precise as time goes on: “through the voice of my deceased brother, who died in the city of Barcelona when it was destroyed by the Muslims, on the 2nd Kalends of July of the year 32 since Lothair reigned.”41 Scribes even have the tendency to place this dating at the beginning of the document, as a way of justifying or authenticating the document itself: “In the year of our lord 986, in the year 31 of the reign of Lothair, on the 4th day of the Kalends of July, the Saracens took Barcelona, and thanks to God despite our sins the city could be taken from them in the same month at 2 nones.”42 39  “Cum aliquid de terra que nobis precepit genitori nostro quando perrexit ad Barchinona civitate, et periit ibi quando ipsa civitas devastata fuit ad ipsis sarracenis.” Cited from Rius, Cartulario de Sant Cugat, 1:141–42 (document 170).

40  “Intravit ad custodiendum Barchinona civitate cum aliis ceteris comorantibus eodem comitatu eodem tempore obsesa est a Sarracenis et apprehensa est VIII idus iulii.” Cited from Rius, Cartulario de Sant Cugat, 1:142–44 (document 171) (December 4, 985). 41  “Per vocem condam fratri meo, qui interiit in civitate Barchinona, quando fuit destructa a Sarracenis II kalendas iulii anno XXXII quod Leotarius rex regnabat.” Cited from Frederic Udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos ix–x. Estudio crítico de sus fondos (Barcelona, 1951), 215–16 (document 219) (November 1, 989). 42  “Annus Domini DCCCCLXXXVI, imperante Leuthario XXXI anno, die kalendas julii, IIII feria, a Sarracenis obsessa est Barchinona, et permittente Deo, impediente peccata nostra, capta est ab eis

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Such a development is quite unprecedented. It paradoxically ends up making the event so familiar in the consciousness of the people of Barcelona that it is no longer necessary to date it absolutely, as if it introduced a new chrono­logy “from the destruction of the city” (ab urbe destructa). Several documents evoke the event without further precision: “in the year in which Barcelona died” (ipso anno quando Barchinona interiit) (992); “in the year in which Barcelona was destroyed” (in anno quod fuit Barchinona dextructa) (989); “on the day of the submission of Barcelona” (in die submersionis Barchinona) (987); “before Barcelona was taken by the Saracens” (antequam Barchinona capta fuisset a Sarracenis) (1015).43 The mention of the sack of Barcelona provides a number of narratives and, for several decades, it supplied the recurring theme for a series of preambles with exclusively historical content. Some of these are disseminated as formulae but some of them constitute real historio­graphical essays: In the year of our Lord 986, on the day of the Kalends of July, advancing in battle, the Ismaelites came against the people. It was the year 31 of the reign of the king of the Franks Lothar and, they, devastating all the land, reached Barcelona, and took and depopulated all the city. They caused a great fire, which consumed everything and what was not consumed they took away with their hands. They took the documents about the ownership of the land, and documents and volumes of books, which were in part consumed by the fire and in part taken by them.44

The intensity of the narrative is sustained in other documents with the choice of varied, dramatic vocabulary. For the period from 985 to 1033, and particularly 988 to 992, I have collected the terms that stress the seriousness of the events of July 985. By personalizing the city of Barcelona, the vocabulary contributes to maintaining awareness of a collective destiny among its inhabitants. Barcelona was, in fact “taken,” “conquered,” “seized,” “captured,” “destroyed,” “dissipated,” “devastated,” “depopulated” (obsessa, apprehensa, deprehensa, capta, destructa, dissipata, devastata, depopulata). The documents evoke the day when “it died,” “was murdered,” “was endangered” (periit, interiit, periclitavit). They describe its “conquest,” “appropriation,” “destruction,” “submersion,” “extermination,” “capture,” “captivity,” “interruption” (obsessio, intericio, interitus, submersio, exterminacio, captio, captivitas, interruptio).45 This astonishing continuity in the recollection of the episode is explained by how slow and difficult it was to deal with its consequences. The disaster of 985 is always

in eadem mense, II nonas.” From Barcelona, Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Libri Antiquitatum 2, n. 46 (October 17, 987). 43  Zimmermann, “La prise de Barcelone par Al-Mansûr,” 191–218.

44  “Annus Domini DCCCCmo LXXXmo VI°, die kalendarum iulii processi Hismaeliti in prelio contra gentes anno XXX°I regnante Francorum rege Lautario venerunt usque ad Barchinona: qui omnem terram devastantes prendiderunt ac depopulaverunt totam Barchinonam succenderuntque in ea magno incendio ita ut congregata integerrime consumerent, et quod evasit predonum manibus asportarunt, instrumenta terram deportaverunt quoque cartarum ac volumina librorum partem consumpserunt igni, partem ad suam.” From Barcelona, Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Libri Antiquitatum 2, n. 518 (November 17, 994). 45  Zimmermann, “La prise de Barcelone par Al-Mansûr,” 191–218.

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mentioned in relation to a particular situation. It provides the reasons for the existence of fallow land not claimed by any owner; provides the need for alms to restore a destroyed church; guides the generosity of the faithful towards ransoming of captives; or introduces endless disputes resulting from the deaths of inhabitants or the loss of property titles. In the preambles themselves, the terms in which it is mentioned coincide with a peak of dramatic intensity for deploring the loss of notarial documents and property titles. And there disappeared all the substance of those who lived there, both books and royal precepts or all the writings in any way made by those who held all their allods or properties among them and those from their parents for two hundred years or more before; among those lost were the writings of a man named Adam and his wife whose name was Dulcidia.46

They took everything they could: the fruit from the fields, the documents, diplomas, and many volumes of books, partly burnt and partly taken to their land. Among those who lost documents that justified the possession of assets, donations, concessions, endowments, exchanges, purchases, and registers of royal precepts of donation and confirmation of privileges, there was the monastery of the Holy Apostle Peter for young girls [...] because, as we said, everything in the above-mentioned attack died and disappeared, so now it must be investigated to re-establish the documentary inventory.47

The laborious completion of business procedures for settling legal disputes, re-establishing property titles, discovering the fate of people who have disappeared, and making possible the ransoming of captives readily explain why the sack of Barcelona remained a contextual framework for documents. Was its impact just restricted to the legal and notarial sphere? And was its historio­graphical content purely illusory? In fact, the repetition of “the day Barcelona died”—the identification of a point of rupture after which social memory had to be reconstructed—clearly would have an effect on the collective consciousness of the people of Barcelona and their system of representation. The documentary memory recording defeat and death and the temporary interruption of all civil life gave this calamity real historical impact, and ushered in a new period. The insistence on specifying the circumstances of the drama of 985 and denouncing those responsible for it gave a domestic catastrophe an eschato­logical perspective. 46  “Et ibidem periit omnem substanciam eorum quicquid ibidem congregaverunt tam libris quam preceptis regalis vel cunctis illorum scripturis omnibusque modis confectis per quas retinebant cunctis eorum alodibus vel possessionibus inter eos et precedentes eorum parentibus CC anni et amplius inter quas perdite fuerunt scripturas de quadam homo nomine Adam et de uxor sua nomine Dulcidia.” From Barcelona, Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Libri Antiquitatum 2, n. 46 (October 17, 987).

47  “Et quod inde evasit asportarunt: manubias praediorum, instrumenta quoque cartarum ac diversa volumina librorum, partem consumpsere igni, partim deportavere suam ad terram. Inter quos etiam deperierunt cartulae munificentiae, largitionis, concessionis, dotationis, commutationis, emptionisve seu libellulis praeceptis regali adnotatione confectis atque digesta et corroborata privilegia, ex puellarum monasterio sanctisimo Apostolo Petro […] quoniam, prout diximus, omnia in suprataxata periclitatione deperierunt et contabuerunt, ita ut ne quis investigare ea queat nec invenire praevaluit.” Cited from Ramon d’Abadal, ed., Els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1926), 1:72 (December 31, 991).

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Not only was the destroyer of Barcelona an enemy of the faith, the episode cannot fail to be a reminder that the work of “liberation”—once an enterprise for the Frankish sovereigns—remained incomplete. Beyond the material consequences of the drama, the events of 985 encouraged the insertion of a historical perspective in documents. From the early years of the eleventh century, when the local consequences of the raid begin to be less important, practical documents regularly included—generally in the preamble and sometimes also in the active part—various reminiscences, historical allusions, or even historio­graphical sketches which were gradually freed from empirical subordination to the constraints of current affairs. Historical memory emerged and was embedded in the discourse of charters, becoming a regular component of certain documents. From this point onwards scribes picked up the habit of recording Saracen offensives: “let us record that the Cordobese power came with a large and numerous army to the place of the Penedès and devastated all the marches far and near;”48 or “In the following time a great army of Muslims arrived and assaulted Barcelona.”49 We should remember that this danger, which remains ever-present, is linked to the history of the country and the fact that the land had been freed from Muslim rule by Louis the Pious, whose memory is widely mentioned: “The lord king Louis, son of the deceased emperor Charles, when he freed the city of Barcelona from the heinous domain of the Saracens.”50 The events of 985 revived the memory of Louis the Pious, not so much to stigmatize the failures of his successors as to raise the family of the counts of Barcelona to the level of the Carolingians. The theme of rota mundi, bringing with it the concept of cyclical history, encouraged this promotion, expressed in a very suggestive text from the mid-eleventh century: Despite the sinful misery of the Christian people, Christ raised the pious king Louis who expelled the Ismaelite people and freed the city of Barcelona […]. Thus, having paid the debts to the king of death, the revolutions of the world crossed centuries of lethargic times. Then, due to the sins of mankind, the pagan people invaded and Barcelona was seized. But again Christ had mercy and recovered the mentioned city for the faithful, expelled the gentiles, and passed the succession of the inheritance to the Christian counts.51

48  “Notum […] facimus […] qualiter venit potentiam cordubensis cum magno et innumerabili exercitu in locum Penites et devastarunt omnes marchias longe et prope.” From Barcelona, Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Libri Antiquitatum 4, n. 355 (May 14, 1004). 49  “Sequenti vero tempore exercitus magnus Moabitarum qui biduo Barchinonam civitatem obsedit […].” From Barcelona, Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Libri Antiquitatum 2, n. 123 (undated, 1132?). 50  “Domnus Ludovicus rex, filius qd. Karoli imperatoris, quando liberavit Barchinona civitate ad nefanda Sarracenorum contubernia.” Cited from Rius, Cartulario de Sant Cugat, 2:94–96 (document 449) (July 26, 1012).

51  “Christus quamvis peccatricem miseratus christianam plebem excitavit Ludovicum pium regem qui expulit hismaeliticam gentem et liberavit Barchinonensem urbem […] Cum […] idem rex mortis persolvisset debita et volvente mundi rota veternosa temporum pertransissent secula. Iterum propter hominum peccata gens invaluit pagana et capta est Barchinona [….]. Set etiam Christus misereri paratus predictam urbem postea recuperavit fidelibus, expulsis gentilibus et per successionem hereditatis tradidit christianis comitibus.” From Barcelona, Arxiu Capitular de

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“Acts of God for the counts” (Gesta Dei per comites), apparently! Did this recent victory, making the Catalan counts agents and authors of their own history, have the effect of removing their land from the fatalism of the rota mundi? A text of 1012 was already judging the Catalan victory as being on a completely different scale to that of Louis the Pious as it has put a stop to the rabies paganorum. From there to forgetting the initial liberation is but a small step and one that the documents take easily by offering a snapshot of Catalan history. After a long past of misery and death, mentioned with great indulgence, “all the fear as a result of the perfidy of the Ismaelite people who had left the city empty and deserted without inhabitants […], and with punishment written in solitude, having undergone the intolerable terror of the barbarians”;52 “no inhabitant of our region ignores without sorrow the perverse sword of the pagans that had befallen us for a long time past”;53 “we do not forget that for the city of Tarragona, which was the most famous metropolis for a long time, it has been 390 years since the Saracens took it, the Christians were expelled and has remained alone.”54 A contrast is being made here with a present where restoration and expansion stimulated by a political situation resulted from the implosion of the Caliphate. The memory from now on linking the documents is not that of the “liberating” and protective Frankish royalty, who are now foreigners, but that of the country itself, where “liberation” and “restoration”—always called into question and never completed—are placed within a universal history of salvation. The ideo­logical horizon of the Catalans, as revealed in documents after 1000, contributes to making 985 an essential date. Now, the Catalans were projected into their own history, leading them to rethink their links with the Frankish monarchy in more pragmatic than legal terms, and giving themselves a territorial and political, if not a national, project. The capture of Barcelona was the preface to a double liberation: from the Saracens and from the Frankish monarchy. This project, still diffuse and implicit in the collective memory, needed to become the subject of a conscious and comprehensible construction and to form part of a narrative. The memory of the sack of 985 must have led to a spectacular modification of historio­graphical discourse in Catalan areas.

Barcelona, Libri Antiquitatum 1, n. 29 (November 18, 1058). The text was edited by Marca, Marca hispanica, 1113–16 (appendix, document 248).

52  “Cuncta metu perfide gentis Hismahelitarum vacua et absque habitatore deserta […] et pene in solitudinem redacta, insistente Barbarorum intolerabile terrore.” From Barcelona, Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Libri Antiquitatum 4, n. 421 (October 24, 1069).

53  “Quod gladius seviencium paganorum super nos diu longeque incrasatus sit nullus pene huius nostre regionis inhabitator ignorat.” From Rius, Cartulario de Sant Cugat, 3:175–76 (document 1002) (June 27, 1155). 54  “Non ignoramus quem ad modum urbs tarraconensis famosissima dudum metropolis annis iam ferme CCCXC transactis a Sarracenis capta et Christianis expulsis solitaria facta.” From Vic, Arxiu Capitular de Vic, 2, drawer 6, n. 83 (undated, late eleventh century).

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The Invention of a Catalan History From the first decades of the eleventh century onwards, an astonishing mutation is at work in the field of memorial writing which at the same time involves transfer or addition as well as parasitism or purification. The documentary memory of 985, maintained in charter writing, invaded the first historical works drawn up in Catalonia (annals, chronicles, or simple royal lists) and gradually remodelled them. In this way, a “national” history of Catalonia developed, with the dramatic events of 985 constituting the founding event. The years 985–988 are promoted to the rank of the years of the birth or independence of Catalonia but, despite what certain contemporary politicians or ideo­logues would have us believe, this promotion is not a simple statement of an objective reality but rather a conscious intellectual construction. Political Sovereignty and the Appropriation of Time

In the memory of Catalans, the sack of Barcelona in 985 was directly linked to the contested accession of Hugh Capet in 987 and the refusal by the counts to manifest any allegiance to the usurper. According to Gerbert d’Aurillac, the new king responded to an appeal by Borrell, Count of Barcelona, by combining a promise of aid with unacceptable conditions. For reasons of plausibility as well as chrono­logical context, Gerbert’s letter appears to be the result of an ideo­logical construction and an exercise in style, with no link to the political situation it refers to.55 The rejection of the new sovereign by the Catalan dignitaries and the ironic indifference with which the drafters of documents received it could not have been the only consequence of non-intervention in the face of the Saracen threat. The two phenomena are linked by the fact they were almost simultaneous. The Capetian event of 987, whose significance is greater in the political history of Catalonia (since the reign of Hugh Capet coincides with the end of any kind of political relationship between the Frankish court and the Catalan counts), was relegated and absorbed by that of 985, which made a greater impression on the local populations who were its direct witnesses and victims. Collective memory and the historio­graphical discourse were based around 985. The sack of Barcelona is included in annals and chronicles, a genre largely cultivated in Catalonia following the Frankish model very closely. But a radical rewriting of the chronicles based on a selection of items prior to 985 took place. In time, in as far as the manu­scripts preserved or re-transcribed in the nineteenth century allow us to follow the history of the texts, the process ended up creating a kind of vacuum of original documents, making 985 the starting point for a new historio­graphical construction. By releasing the Catalan counts from any political allegiance and any territorial dependency, the disaster of 985 created a political and human vacuum from which its own history could begin and expand, and a space of identity could be constructed.

55  Michel Zimmermann, “Hugues Capet et Borrell. À� propos de ‘l’indépendance’ de la Catalogne,” in Catalunya i França meridional a l’entorn de l’Any Mil, ed. Xavier Barral i Altet, Domique IognaPrat, Anscari Manuel Mundó, Josep M. Salrach, Michel Zimmermann, 59–64.

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The Stages of Historio­graphical Construction

The proliferation of mentions of the sack of Barcelona in notarial documents, where it appears as a radical breach, must have encouraged subsequent generations to see it as a turning-point in collective history and promoted it to the rank of a historical event worth mentioning in a manner analogous to that other determining element in the history of the city: its “liberation” by Louis the Pious in 801. It gradually became established as such. It is important to follow the stages of this insertion of the documentary memory of the years 985–988 in the construction of an autonomous historio­graphical discourse based on various chronicles that have come down to us either in manu­script form or in the appendices of the Marca hispanica,56 España Sagrada,57 and, above all, the Viage literario a las iglesias de España58 by Jaime Villanueva, which in its transcriptions had the intelligence to include differences in wording and abrupt changes in tone, showing the progress of drafting over time. From successive versions of the same work, it is possible to appreciate the effect of ideo­logical changes to the original chronicle. Initially, the promotion of 985 remains surreptitious and is carried out in favour of the establishment, or through the reworking, of simple royal catalogues: genealogical lists of the Frankish sovereigns. These lists, as we have seen, do not hesitate to challenge the legitimacy of certain sovereigns (e.g., Rudolph) or accompany the more or less unavoidable recognition of Hugh Capet with serious reservations (“then reigned Hugh, who before had been duke, but took the place of the royal government, and reigned in France ten years”).59 These genealogies are enriched by the addition of annalistic notes added to the genealogy after the catalogue of monarchs, or are incorporated into the genealogy itself, 56  Marca, Marca hispanica.

57  Flórez, ed., “Chronicon Barchinonense II,” in Iglesia Ausonense, hoy Vique, España sagrada 28; Enrique Flórez and Manuel Risco, eds., El estado antiguo de la Santa Iglesia de Barcelona, España sagrada. Teatro geográfico-histórico de la Iglesia de España 29 (Madrid, 1775); Francisco José de la Canal, ed., Santa Iglesia de Gerona, 3 vols., España sagrada 43–45 (Madrid, 1801–26); Pedro Sainz de Baranda, ed., Santas Iglesias de Lérida, Roda y Barbastro and Santa Iglesia de Lérida, España sagrada 46–47 (Madrid, 1832–36).

58  Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 5 (Tortosa); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 6 (Vic); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 7 (Vic, Montserrat, and Manresa); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 8 (Ripoll, Berga, and Cardona); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 9 (Cervera, Solsona, À� ger, and Seu d’Urgell); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 10 (La Seu d’Urgell); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 11 (La Seu d’Urgell); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 12 (La Seu d’Urgell and Girona); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 13 (Girona); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 14 (Girona, Roses, and Banyoles); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 15 (Sant Feliu de Guixols, Sant Pere de Rodes, Besalú, Camprodon, and Roda); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 16 (Lleida); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 17 (Lleida and Barcelona); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 18 (Barcelona); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 19 (Terrassa and Tarragona); Villanueva, Viage literario, vol. 20 (Tarragona). 59  “Deinde regnavit Hugo, qui antea Dux extiterat, sed subrepsit locum regiminis et regnavit in Francia annis decem.” Cited from Zimmermann, “La datation des documents catalans du ixème au xiième siècle,” 345–75; Michel Zimmermann, “Entre royaume franc et Califat, soudain la Catalogne…,” in La France de l’An Mil, ed. Robert Delort (Paris, 1990), 75–99.

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where they interrupt the regular succession. Such treatment is reserved for two events from local history: the capture of Barcelona by Louis the Pious, introducing local history, and the sack of 985, which forms a provisional epilogue. The event is mentioned in its place, during the reign of Lothair, such as here in the chronicle of Sant Cugat: “His son Lothair, 33 years. In year 31 of his reign, Barcelona was seized and destroyed by the Saracens, in the era 1203, 2 Nones of July, day 2, moon 14.”60 The presence of such a statement in a working instrument intended to help scribes draw up and read documents could correspond to a technical need, given the disastrous consequences of Al-Mansur’s raid for documents in Barcelona. But is this need enough to explain the scrupulous detail with which the event was recorded? It is, in fact, dated according to three different systems, of which at least one (the Christian era) gives an absolute value. Perhaps the author of the chronicle—or the person who transcribed it at the end of the twelfth century—intended to stress, in the middle of the royal succession, a particularly important episode in the history of Barcelona? The mention of the capture of Barcelona in the middle of a genealogy of Frankish sovereigns seems to express a desire to mark the event as an essential point in local history. This becomes clearer at a second stage, with the first works of Catalan historio­ graphy—those annalistic compendiums incorrectly classed as chronicles which were gathered and linked to one another by Miquel Coll i Alentorn.61 The capture of Barcelona occupies an exceptional place in them that has not escaped Catalan historians, starting with Ferran Valls i Taberner: A very important event in the comital era, which left indelible memories on early Catalan historiography, was the taking and looting of Barcelona by Almanzor’s Muslim army in 985 [...]. [T]he clear indication of that painful fact appears in various chronicles or annals in various formats in our country during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and some of them continued later.62

Coll i Alentorn underlines, in turn, “the transcendence of this date in our early historio­ graphy.”63 In fact, the entire historio­graphical construction offered by the chronicles is organized around the events of 985.64 It was in Ripoll, the place where the count’s deed was celebrated, where Catalan historical production was concentrated until the end of the 60  “Leotarius, filius eius XXXIII. Anno autem XXXI regni eius capta est et destructa a Sarracenis Barchinona, in era MXXIII, II nonas iulii, feria II, luna XIIII.” Cited from Coll i Alentorn, “El cronicó de Sant Cugat,” 258. 61  Coll i Alentorn, “La historiografia de Catalunya,” 143–95.

62  Un fet molt important de l’època comtal, que deixà inesborrable record en la primitiva historiografia catalana, fou la presa i saqueig de Barcelona per l’exèrcit musulmà d’Almansur en 985 [...] la indicació concisa d’aquell fet dolorós figura en diversos cronicons o annals formats en el nostre país durant els segles XI i XII, i continuats alguns d’ells posteriorment. Cited from Valls i Taberner, “Els inicis de la historiografia,” 1–14. 63  transcendència d’aquesta data en la nostra historiografia primitiva. Cited from Coll i Alentorn, “La historiografia de Catalunya,” 145. 64  Zimmermann, “La prise de Barcelone par Al-Mansûr,” 191–218.

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twelfth century. The analysis of the various chronicles appearing under the name rivipullenses show how written history in Catalonia became freed from Frankish historio­ graphy and constructed around local events. The Chronicon Alterum Rivipullense, the oldest Catalan chronicle, known from a version from the end of the twelfth century, includes one hundred and seventy-eight annalistic notes between the years 27 and 1191 and is split almost in half (eighty-five and ninety-three) by the mention of the capture of Barcelona: “Barcelona was taken by the Saracens” (capta fuit Barchinona a Sarracenis).65 Jaime Villanueva highlighted that this comment constitutes a hiatus, as it corresponds to a continuation of the chronicle and appears at a date notably later than when the previous events are recorded: “These and what follow were annotated by a more recent hand”.66 But the change in writing corresponds to a radical change of historical perspective. The first part of the chronicle begins as a universal chronicle mentioning the reigns of the Roman emperors and the beginnings of Christianity. It continues in the eighth century with the evocation of the arrival of the Saracens in Spain, the reigns of the first Carolingians, the liberation of Girona and Barcelona; but between 813 and 984 it is reduced to a genealogical and obituary Carolingian chrono­logy. Each reign is framed by the date of accession and that of the death of the sovereign. From 912, the pace becomes more chaotic. The tendency is now to give just a single date per reign. As the Frankish sovereigns become less prominent, Catalan counts gain prominence. The deaths of Wilfred II (912) and that of Miró (928) are mentioned. Sunifred of Cerdanya earns two mentions, including his death in 966. Linked to the Ripoll declaration, the presence of the counts begins to intrude. The mention of the sack of Barcelona introduces the second part of the chronicle. After two final shocks (the deaths of Lothair and Louis VI), all royal mentions disappear. Hugh Capet is ignored and the death of Robert I is mentioned incidentally among seven deaths. At the same time (from 987 to 1031) there are six notes concerning the counts’ family. The removal of the Frankish royal family and the affirmation of the dynasties of counts express a deliberate change of perspective. For the continuer of the chronicle, the events of 985 constitute a turning point. The confrontations with the Saracens are mentioned at closer and closer intervals in a context going beyond a merely Catalan one. In death, the Catalan counts, now fully sovereign, were joined by the Castilian kings, who, like them, were busy freeing their homeland, for instance: “In the year 1034 count Berenguer of Barcelona and king Sancho of Castile died. […]. In 1065 count Ermengol, count of Urgell was killed and king Ferdinand died.”67 The cultural importance of Ripoll must have ensured wide dissemination of the works written in the abbey. Our chronicle gave rise to many subsequent rivipullenses. In another of them, the Alterum Chronicon Rotense, we once again find the events of 985, 65  Stefano Maria Cingolani, Els annals de la família rivipullense i les genealogies de PallarsRibagorza (Valencia, 2012), 41.

66  Haec et quae sequuntur recentiori manu notata sunt. Cited from Villanueva, Viage literario, 5:244.

67  “Anno MXXXIIII. Ob. Berengarius comes Barch. et Sancius rex Castellae […] Anno MLXV. Interfectus est Ermengaudus comes Urgell. et ob. Fredinandus rex.” Cited from Cingolani, Els annals de la família rivipullense, 42–43.

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the result of the grafting of Catalan culture onto an area hitherto marked by Aragonese influences: the county of Ribagorça. From 1068 to 1074, a monk from Ripoll, Salomon, occupied the bishop’s see in Roda and undoubtedly had the opportunity to introduce the early version of the Ripoll chronicle there. The county of Ribagorça was, from then on, integrated into the Catalan cultural ambit. But the chronicle almost makes this integration coincide with the catastrophe of 985, as if it was a matter of appropriating Catalan history from the very first. A first collection of twenty-two annalistic notes devoted to the martyrs of the early Christian centuries, all dated following the Spanish era style, a form of dating in use in the kingdom of Aragon, was extended, after a hiatus of five centuries, with a mention of the Spanish martyr Pelagius. But the martyr’s date, still given in the Spanish era style, was immediately converted into a year following the Incarnation—“The year of the Lord 926, when he was born” (Annus Domini DCCCCXXVI quando ipse fuit natus)—, following which, Catalan history suddenly appears with a mention of the sack of 985—“In the year 985, Barcelona was captured by the Saracens” (Anno DCCCCLXXXV capta fuit Barchinona a Sarracenis)—and the death of Borrell in 992.68 All the subsequent notes concern local history. The exaltation of the count’s deeds prevents any evocation of French royalty and alternates with reminders of the Saracen menace presented as particularly pressing and deadly, mentioned after the eleventh century with much greater frequency than in other chronicles. The Ripoll series of chronicles therefore offers an invitation to make 985 the first date in Catalan history, obliterating the memory of previous centuries. A second family of chronicles, the Barcelona chronicles or barcinonenses, were drawn up in a less ecclesiastical or monastic context than the first. They come down to us in the transcriptions of the España sagrada69 and Marca hispanica70 and make their point clear by beginning with the disaster. The most striking example is provided by the Chronicon Barcinonense I, surviving in a version from the beginning of the fourteenth century, undoubtedly after several reworkings (the notes go on until 1311). The chronicle clearly begins with the capture of Barcelona: “On 3 Nones of July in the year 985 the city of Barcelona was seized by the pagans.”71 After a hiatus of a century, the note is followed by eight others, from 1082 to 1169, seven of which commemorate Muslim towns falling into Christian hands. Although it is credible that, as the chronicle expanded, most of the early part got cut, the fact that the date 985 was maintained and takes a prominent position at the beginning looks like a deliberate choice. That means Al-Mansur’s raid, although it was a disaster, was the last disaster suffered by Barcelona, ushering in a period of Catalan expansion and triumph. The date is definitely the starting point of Catalan history, a strictly Catalan story, and 68  Cingolani, Els annals de la família rivipullense, 118–19.

69  José de la Canal, ed., De las Santas Iglesias de Lérida, Roda y Barbastro en su estado antiguo, and Pedro Sainz de Baranda, ed., De la Santa Iglesia de Lérida en su estado moderno, España sagrada 46–47. 70  Marca, Marca hispanica.

71  “Tertio Non. Julii anno DCCCCLXXXV fuit capta civitas Barchinonensis a Paganis.” Cited from Enrique Flórez, ed., “Chronicon Barcinonense I,” in Iglesia Ausonense, hoy Vique, España sagrada 28, 337.

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this is confirmed by the rigorous ordering of the annalistic notes in comparison with a slightly earlier chronicle very close to it in content but completely out of order. Chronicon Barcinonense II includes almost the same annalistic notes as Barcinonense I but suffers from complete chrono­logical confusion, because the fall of Barcelona is placed between the taking of Damietta by the Christians (1219) and the liberation of Almeria (1147). The process of organizing Barcinonense I was therefore initially chrono­ logical, but it also consisted of eliminating everything that did not refer to Catalan history, namely, the genealogy of the Frankish kings which was placed after the chronicle and, in the annalistic series prior to 1200, three notes concerning the death of Charlemagne, the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, and the recapture of Jerusalem by Saladin. The events of 985 are therefore naturally placed at the beginning of the chronicle. The two chronicles still remained close enough to continue to be transcribed and used simultaneously. The entry on the disaster of 985 in the Catalan chronicles involves a radical change of historio­graphical perspective. Now 985 becomes the starting date for a domestic, if not national, history, ipso facto rendering the earlier passages obsolete. This is why the enterprise of textual reorganization which ended up making 985 the founding date of Catalan history was necessary. It became an almost official date introduced towards the end of the Middle Ages, as a preface, in chronicles whose material is from several centuries later. A higher level of elaboration of historio­graphical discourse appeared at a third period, with the writing of real histories which, faithful to the criteria set by Isidore of Seville, are distinguished from chronicles by the existence of a continuous narrative and the absence of dates, or at least of sustained dating to reinforce the chrono­logical progression. The first Catalan history in this sense is represented by the original nucleus of the Gesta Comitum Barcinonensium,72 composed in Ripoll between the death of Ramon Berenguer IV (1162) and that of Ermengol VII of Urgell (1184), putting it just after the union between the county of Barcelona and Aragon and the triumphant conquest of New Catalonia, which extended the limits of the principality to the lower Ebro valley. This early version of the Gesta is a genealogy of the dynasties of counts, starting with Wilfred, as the first editors stressed: “The writer was less concerned about relating the deeds by the different counts than about indicating each one’s genealogical ascendence and descendence and their relations.”73 The Gesta adopts a rigorously chrono­logical plan— that of the successive “reigns” of the counts of Barcelona—followed by a cursory return to the cadet branches of the dynasty. Easily accepting legendary information, the genealogy was suddenly interrupted to insert a passage in the genre of a chronicle, mentioning the capture of Barcelona in 985: “in the times of Count Borrell the city of Barcelona was seized and devastated by the Saracens, in the year of the Incarnation of the Lord 985.”74 72  Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, ed. Louis Barrau Dihigo and Jaume Massó Torrents (Barcelona, 1925).

73  El redactor s’ha preocupat menys de relatar les gestes dels diversos comtes que no pas de marcar l’ascendència i la descendència de cada un d’entre ells. Cited from Louis Barrau Dihigo, “Introducció,” in Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, ed. Dihigo and Torrents, 22.

74  “Borrelli comitis temporibus civitas Barchinona a Sarracenis capta et devastata est, anno

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In the entire early version of the Gesta, this is the only dated event. By isolating it like this, the chronicler surely meant to give it an exceptional and at least symbolic importance. He made it the preface and the counterpoint to contemporary events: the triumphs of Ramon Berenguer IV, capable of taking two towns in the same day—“in one and the same day he conquered Lleida and Fraga” (uno eodemque die eandem Ilerdam ac Fragam cepit)—and extending the influence of the dynasty to the limits of the world: “he shone most famously across the whole world” (toto orbe famosissimus claruit).75 But it is the whole dynasty that the Gesta composed in Ripoll meant to celebrate and, in particular, its ancestor Wilfred, founder of the abbey that had become the necropolis of the counts. The requirements of panegyric made it desirable and even necessary to frame the narrative with two antagonistic phenomena: an initial disaster synonymous with a breach with the past and a contemporary triumph. But how could they reconcile the need for this disaster predating the establishment of the dynasty and the familiar reality of the disaster recognized as the founding point? The facts contradicted the desired narrative and the documents the author of the Gesta boasted of having used— “written in old documents” (antiquis cartarum scriptis)—would remind him that the sack of Barcelona actually took place in 985 in the reign of Borrell II, great-grandson of Wilfred, the first sovereign count. He could not just overwrite an episode occupying such a place in the collective memory, but even so it was impossible not to associate the person of Wilfred with a major breach. The need to link the sovereign dynasty with an episode recognized as the cornerstone of Catalan independence led the chronicler to split the narrative of the years 985–988 and insert two reprises in the genealogy: once in its true chrono­logical place, with dates, in a formula literally borrowed from previous chronicles; and then by transposing into the times of Wilfred, a century earlier, the events occurring under Borrell: the Muslim invasion, the appeal for help to the Frankish king, the refusal, abandoning the count to his own forces, and independence resulting from this royal absence: A large number of Saracens ran to him (Wilfred), who went to their homeland and penetrated it and took it all. He himself informed the king and requested help to push the Saracens far away. But the king was occupied in other affairs and could not lend him the requested aid. Despite that, the above-mentioned Wilfred took up the challenge and, with his men, drove the Hagarenes [Muslims] back beyond their frontier. Thus he won Barcelona, for ever, for himself and his descendants, because previously the county was not transmitted by succession but rather to whom the king of France wanted, at the place and time he wished. Wilfred gathered many Gallic noble troops, and expelled the Hagarenes from all his frontiers, and he fought them to the limits of Lleida. All these domains that he had fought hard to recover he held as his own domain. Thus, ruling just as a royal power, he went on to constitute the domain of Barcelona that is in the hands of our counts of Barcelona.76

dominice incarnationis DCCCCLXXXV.” Cited from Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, ed. Dihigo and Torrents, 6. 75  Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, ed. Dihigo and Torrents, 38–39.

76  “Cucurrit ad eum (Guifredum) relatio Sarracenos in patriam suam venisse, totamque fere simul pervasisse et obtinuisse. Intimans igitur et ipse hoc regi, auxilium ab eo ad depellendos

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This narrative of Wilfred’s reign has a clearly anti-Frankish tone seasoned with tragicomic details intended to support the myth and maintain the idea of hostility between the two peoples. It is based on a legend—Wilfred’s marriage to the daughter of Baldwin “Iron Arm,” Count of Flanders. This legend, which amounts to a kind of erudite justification, could only be recent. According to Coll i Alentorn,77 it could have emerged in the early twelfth century from Catalan concerns about the reappearance of a royal presence in the south of the realm. The chronicler seems to be intending to demonstrate solidarity with the Flemish “resistance” to the initiatives of Louis VI. But the bulk of the narrative is a direct transposition of the events of 985–988, which the chronicles had made a founding episode. At the price of improper chrono­logical transposition, the events of 985–988 are now directly related to the affirmation of the dynasty, whose genealogy begins with an episode of emancipation. The glory of Ramon Berenguer IV made the idea that the dynasty’s rise could only have been enjoyed when limited or shared sovereignty was shown to be not sustainable. The sack of Barcelona and its political consequences no longer merely constituted an anonymous or clandestine starting point for Catalan history. Transposed a century earlier, it is the very story of a dynasty whose existence merged into that of the country they had founded and legitimized. At this point, the legendary origins can be constructed. The importance of memory written in the documents does not prevent its instrumentalization. The Gesta as a chronicle is selective and lets material disappear, but it becomes the founder of the dynasty and creator of legitimacy. We have seen how a local event, which was in fact disastrous but had limited consequences, after being developed in writing and remaining in the memory for a long time precisely because of its legal and notarial implications, was reconstituted into one that provided the origins of a collective or “national” history. These medi­eval historians turned their focus only to the area of Catalonia and metamorphozed the defeat into a founding event, that broke down the cycle of the rota mundi. It was, at the same time, both a means of emancipation and an opportunity for introspective withdrawal, but the defeat proved an essential stage in the awareness and affirmation of identity.

Sarracenos poposcit. Sed rex aliis impeditus negotiis, prestare ei auxilium non potuit. Hoc tamen eius postulationi attribuit, ut si a predictis finibus suis Agarenos ipse per se Guifredus et cum suis expellere valeret, Barchinonensis honor in eius dominium et totius generis sui in perpetuum deveniret; nam antea nemini per successionem generis idem comitatus datus, sed cui et quanto temporis spatio Francorum rex voluisset. Congregatis igitur Guifredus hinc inde Gallicorum procerum copiis, Agarenos ab universis finibus suis expulsos usque in fines Ilerde compulit, totumque prefatum honorem suum strenuissime recuperatum in dominium possedit. Ecce quomodo de potestate regali in manus nostrorum comitum Barchinonensium honor ipse Barchinonensis devenit.” Cited from Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, ed. Dihigo and Torrents, 5. 77  Coll i Alentorn, “La historiografia de Catalunya.”

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Conclusion

The medi­eval genesis of Catalan history—a paradigmatic example of the quest for origins—appears as a model for historio­graphical construction. The memory of the origins of Catalonia is not dominated by a mytho­logical or etymo­logical discourse rooted in the cult of an eponymous hero or the name of a people. It has its roots in the writing of documents. The writing of Catalan history takes its source in historical events, at the heart of a historical narrative supported by abundant documentary memory which developed an event with high symbolic impact (the loss of archives and other details of individual and communal identity; death or exile; and the need to start completely afresh after this annihilation). The documentation records, in turn, the changes of royal succession and the growing reticence over the accession of the Capetians, and so the memory of rupture/rejection takes on a clear political significance. It determined an origin date, which coincided with that of the sovereign dynasty, and this conflation was carried out from the early version of the Gesta onwards at the price of a surreptitious dissociation of the disaster of 985. Local memory of a rather inglorious event had by now mutated into the commemoration of a founding event of dynastic glory. The field was now free for the construction of a mythical history: the legend of Wilfred for which the Gesta provided the basis. The origins of Catalonia, as was generally the case in the Middle Ages, required the existence of a predestined founding individual.

Chapter 5

THE MEMORY OF SAINTS IN THE HISPANIC TRANSLATIONES OF THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES ARIEL GUIANCE

In recent years, several studies have highlighted the way in which the past has been used down the centuries to construct identities, give cohesion to social groups, and ideo­logically sustain particular political or cultural stances.1 These issues have been of equal interest to historians, psycho­logists, philosophers, and socio­logists eager to find the keys that could explain such use of past events (as well as so many other uses of the past) and reveal the complex mechanisms by which we remember (or are forced to remember) certain circumstances while casting others aside. In this way, memory presents itself as a vital cultural structure in human development with both individual and communal aspects, and one that is able to articulate a relationship with that past but also with the present and the future. For the Middle Ages, Carmen Marimón has pointed out: Memory was, no doubt, the medium chosen by the medi­eval world to recognize itself and its forms of expression. It was something beyond a stock, it was a dynamic space, at the same time individual and collective, through which traditional forms evolved and were transmitted.2

I am especially interested in the last part of this statement as memory had a dynamic nature and served to create and uphold a new ideo­logical concept, presenting it as a resurgence of the past, or making the past its place of origin. This function is only known

1  For example, see, amongst others, the works of Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medi­eval Culture (Cam­bridge, 1996); Jacques Le Goff, El orden de la memoria (Barcelona, 1991); Patrick Geary, La mémoire et l’oubli à la fin du premier millénaire (Paris, 1996); Paul Zumthor, Jeux de mémoire. Aspects de la mnémotechnique médiévale (Paris, 1990); Paul Ricoeur, “Histoire et mémoire: l’écriture de l’histoire et la réprésentation du passé,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales 55, no. 4 (2000): 731–47; and Paul Ricoeur, La memoria, la historia y el olvido (Madrid, 2003); plus the classic work by Frances Amelia Yates, El arte de la memoria (Madrid, 2005), esp. 71ff. 2  La memoria fue sin duda el medio que el mundo medieval eligió para reconocerse constantemente a sí mismo y a sus formas de expresión. Fue algo más que un depósito, fue el espacio dinámico, a la vez individual y colectivo, a través del cual las formas tradicionales se transmitieron y evolucionaron. Cited from Carmen Marimón, “‘La memoria de omne deleznadera es’: oralidad, textualidad y medios de transmisión en la Edad Media,” Dicenda. Cuadernos de filo­logía hispánica 24 (2006): 139–59, esp. 149.

Ariel Guiance ([email protected]) is Investigador Principal in Medi­eval History at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientí�ficas y Técnicas, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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to us, of course, to the extent that documents of that “artificial memory of what happened” have survived. In fact, rather than what happened and what was remembered, the most interesting phenomenon in this case is to analyze how those memories were manipulated in order to sustain a totally novel frame of thinking. That manipulation (regarding, again, medi­eval times) can best be explored in writing and icono­graphy; oral traditions existed, but many of them were lost as they were never transferred to documents. Alfonso the Wise clearly noticed this, saying that “it is writing which adduces all rights of remembrance.”3 Even so, despite being fixed in writing or icono­graphy, some supposedly arbitrary evocation of the past that is imposed will not necessarily remain unchanged but, rather, it can be subjected to new additions and transformations over time. In other words, it is a memory transformed by a new memory of the events. In the same way, remembrance and memory (either of true or fictive events) do not only have an evocative function but—and I think this is fundamental—they are also paradigms of knowledge. This concept goes back to the classical period,4 was later developed by Augustine, and summarized by Isidore in the sense that “memory is mind, whence forgetful people are called mindless […]; mind when it knows, memory when it recollects.”5 Therefore, to evoke something is more than just a simple mnemonic exercise: it implies a basic stage in the production of new knowledge. We arrive, thus, at the memory–knowledge–discourse triad which will be one of the core elements of medi­eval thought at least until the scholastic period. By the same token, not to keep that memory (be it individual or collective, and in any kind of media) was seen as a sign of ignorance and cultural incompetence, as Juan Ruiz affirmed many centuries after Isidore: And I also say that this derives from the lack of memory, because it has not been educated for the right knowledge, so it cannot love the good or behave remembering the good. And this moreover comes from human nature, that is as close to and inclined towards evil as it is to good […]. And these are some of the reasons why books are made about law and justice and about punishments and customs and other forms of knowledge. Moreover, painting and writing and images were first agreed by reason, given that that human memory is feeble.6

3  “Es escritura cosa que aduce todos los fechos á remembranza.” Cited from Alfonso X el Sabio, Partida segunda de Alfonso X el Sabio, ed. Aurora Juárez Blanquer and Antonio Rubio Flores (Granada, 1991), 88 (Segunda partida, law 8, title 9). See also Alfonso X el Sabio, Las siete partidas de don Alfonso X el Sabio, glosadas por Gregorio López, ed. Gregorio López, (Madrid, 1555; repr. 1984).

4  Marimón, “‘La memoria de omne’,” 145–50. Geary, La mémoire et l’oubli, 37ff., who remarks on the Neoplatonic influence behind this notion and its evolution in early Christian thought.

5  “Nam et memoria mens est, unde et inmemores amentes […] dum scit, mens est: dum recolit, memoria est.” Cited from Isidoro de Sevilla, Etimo­logías, ed. José Oroz Reta and Manuel A. MarcosCasquero, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1993), 2:14 (XI, 1, 13).

6  “E aún digo que viene de la pobredad de la memoria que non está instructa del buen entendi­ miento, ansí� que non puede amar el bien nin acordarse d`ello para lo obrar. E viene otrosí� esto por razón que la natura umana, que más aparejada e inclinada es al mal que al bien […]. E éstas son algunas de las razones porque son fechos los libros de la ley e del derecho e de los castigos e constunbres e de otras çiençias. Otrosí� fueron la pintura e la escriptura e las imágenes primeramente

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In medi­eval thought, recovering a fact and preserving it implied, therefore, various operations, aimed, as mentioned, at producing certain knowledge. In this chapter I want to focus on one of those potential operations, looking at recovery of the past as a synonym for explicit manipulation of events (or as a discursive fabrication of something that supposedly happened) that had to be remembered in order to accomplish a specific goal. Consequently this paper will explore how memory of certain events can be employed by specific social strata, who through it sought to create a precedent (to the extent that memory is, I insist, a way of producing new knowledge) and endow it, at the same time, with historical legitimacy. Since this issue has been extensively studied in recent times, scholars have considered the construction of memory by medi­eval monarchies, the nobility, urban groups, artisans, the Church, and more.7 In particular, concerning the Church, several works have emphasized the way in which the different groups that composed the ecclesiastical institutions consciously created specific historical traditions in order to justify their actions in the secular world or to affirm certain ideo­logical or cultural conceptions that would benefit them. Such creative actions could be incidental (prompted by specific demands at a specific moment) or, much more frequently, sought to define an authentic doctrinal corpus (in other words, to transform simple remembrance in valid knowledge). As with general studies about memory, we have insufficient space to summarize studies on this topic within the Medi­eval Church. However, there is a consensus that, when the Church needed to affirm itself as a separate institution, it surpassed all other agents of its time in the invention and reinvention of memories, which were employed to compensate for fluctuations suffered because of its secular power and its situation in the world. Accordingly, I would like to propose an analysis of a very specific topic to this academic question, addressing memory, antiquity, and (in certain cases) the recovery of holy relics. These served as resources, first, to forge a common identity; secondly, give cohesion to a social body; thirdly, to sustain specific secular rights; and, finally, to establish a power structure within a given historical context. I am particularly interested in assessing the extent to which the discursive use of the problem of the relics contributed to the creation of a sense of ecclesiastical identity and supremacy in the Iberian Peninsula. With this goal in mind, we will primarily study the translationes, tales that narrate the circumstances surrounding the finding (real or fictitious), transfer, and definitive placement of sacred remains.8 Concretely, I will examine texts produced in the eleventh

falladas por razón que la memoria del omne deleznadera es.” Juan Ruiz arcipreste de Hita, Libro del Buen Amor, ed. Joaquí�n Rafael Fontanals and Lí�dia Pons (Barcelona, 1978), 72; Marimon, “‘La memoria de omne’,” 151.

7  The biblio­g raphy on this topic is immense. For a good introduction, see Patrick Geary, “Mémoire,” in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’Occident médiéval, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris, 1999), 684–98; and Ester Contreras, “Memoria, mito y realidad en la historia medi­ eval. Una aproximación bibliográfica,” in Memoria, mito y realidad en la historia medi­eval. xiii Semana de estudios medi­evales, Nájera, 29 de julio al 2 de agosto de 2002, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte (Logroño, 2003), 431–73 (with an extensive biblio­graphy). 8  It should be noted that, in many cases, these translationes include, or appear linked with, the hagio­graphical subgenre of inventiones, that is, narratives about the discovery of the remains. For

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and twelfth centuries, a time of great change in Hispanic history and in the evolution of the Iberian Church (think of the problems around the change of the Visigothic Rite, the struggle for metropolitan supremacy, the consolidation of cathedral chapters, and the situation of the monastic orders).9 Within this group of translationes I will consciously omit undoubtedly the best-known example of a medi­eval Iberian translation, that of the Apostle James the Greater, not only because it has been repeatedly studied but also because it requires the analysis of a period outside my proposed timeframe. With this exception, we will observe the transformations of this hagio­graphical genre and the way in which it was used by the different authors of these texts to define concrete interests by invoking the age of the remains, their insertion in the glorious past of Christendom, and the memory held (or discursively created) about them.

Social Identity, Urban Memory, and the Control of Relics

One of the earliest social functions of the relics of saints was to give cohesion to a communal identity, based on the possession of those remains and a shared memory of the characters captured in those vestiges. In this way, “à partir du moment où le culte des reliques s’attachait à une communauté, à une ville ou à une région, les reliques devenaient progressivement le symbole même de l’utilité publique de cette communauté” (From the moment that the cult of relics is linked with a community, a city, a region, they progressively became the symbol of the public utility of this community).10 Likewise, the acquisition and protection of those relics served from the start to establish certain hierarchical aspirations on the part of the centres that housed them, introducing a form of legitimizing discourse that would be widely employed by ecclesiastical literature throughout the continent. In the specific case of Spain, the first sign of the use of relics to create such local identity and reinforce links inside the community (whilst demonstrating its relevance as Christendom gained ground in Iberia) is the one given by Aurelius Prudentius at the end of the fourth century and turn of the fifth. In his Peristephanon, Prudentius includes a series of references that suggest Hispania lacks the amount of saintly remains possessed by Rome but he indicates, nevertheless, that the land has enough relics to be independent, on this subject, from the Holy See and from any other ecclesiastical centre. For example, compared with Rome, he claims (in the hymn dedicated to St. Lawrence): “Scarcely even have we heard report how full Rome is of buried saints, how richly her city’s soil blossoms with holy tombs. Still though we lack these an introduction to the topic: Edmond Sejourné, “Reliques,” in Dictionnaire de théo­logie catholique, ed. Alfred Vacant and Eugène Mangenot (Paris, 1908), cols. 2312–2376; Martin Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des Reliquienkultes (Turnhout, 1979); Jacques Dubois, Jean-Loup Lemaî�tre, Sources et méthodes de l’hagio­graphie médiévale (Paris, 1993), 247–319 (both with an extensive biblio­graphy); and Pedro Castillo, Cristianos y hagiógrafos. Estudio de las propuestas de excelencia cristiana en la Antigüedad tardía (Madrid, 2002), 171–87. 9  A good overview about this issue can be found in Adeline Rucquoi, “La invención de una memoria: los cabildos peninsulares del siglo XII,” Temas medi­evales 2 (1992): 67–80.

10  Edina Bozoky, “Voyage de reliques et démonstration du pouvoir aux temps féodaux,” in Voyages et voyageurs au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1996), 267–80 at 267.

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blessings and cannot see the traces of blood with our own eyes, we look up to heaven on high.”11 However, from the opposite perspective, he makes a detailed inventory of local relics in a hymn dedicated to the martyrs of Zaragoza, claiming that at the Last Judgement each city will provide the bones of its chosen ones. Thus Carthage will show the remains of St. Ciprian, Cordoba those of Acisclo and Zoilo, Tarragona those of Fructuoso, Girona those of Félix, Barcelona will bring those of St. Cucufate, Merida will do the same with the relics of St. Eulalia, Alcala de Henares will deliver those of Justo and Pastor, and Calahorra will grant those from “the two we venerate” (that is, Emeterius and Celedonius). In view of this, Prudentius clarifies: A few cities will find favour because of only one, some because of two or three, perhaps even of five witnesses to Christ, the sacrifices they gave in pledge before. But thou, Caesaraugusta, that art zealous for Christ, wilt bring again thy holy eighteen […]. Scarce is the populous mother of the Punic world, scarce Rome herself, set on her throne, worthy to outstrip thee, our glory, in this offering.12

Martyrs’ relics hence affirm cities’ roles as guarantees of social welfare and of certain supernatural protection, acting as an element of integration while, at the same time, reaffirming the position of each human community within the broader context of Christendom.13 This guarantee applied primarily to the inhabitants of the place where the relics rested and secondarily extended to those who visited the area.14 Thus, the bones of Fructuoso, Augurio, and Eulogio helped all the peoples in the Pyrenees,15 whilst those of St. Agnes did the same in Rome, caring for the citizens of that city, whilst also protecting strangers provided they prayed with a pure and faithful heart.16 We are, quite clearly, within the model of the early patronus saint—which has been analyzed 11  “Vix fama nota est abditis/ quam plena sanctis Roma sit/ quam diues urbanum solum/ sacris sepulcris floreat./ Sed qui caremus his bonis/ nec sanguinis uestigia/ uidere coram possumus,/ caelum intuemur eminus.” Cited from Aurelius Prudencius, “Peristephanon,” in Obras completas de Aurelio Prudencio, ed. Alfonso Ortega and Isidoro Rodrí�guez (Madrid, 1981), 522 (II, vv. 541–584), the English translation taken from Loeb; Michael Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of Martyrs. The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius (Ann Arbor, 1993), 15–18, who analyzes Prudentius’ attitude regarding relics and the ties with their cult at the time of the author.

12  “Singulis paucae, tribus aut duobus,/ forsan et quinis aliquae placebunt/ testibus Christi prius hostiarum pignere functae. Tu decem sanctos reuehes et octo,/ Caesaraugusta studiosa Christo […]. Vix parens orbis populosa Poeni,/ ipsa uix Roma in solio locata/ te, decus nostrum, superare in isto/ munere digna est.” Cited from Prudencius, “Peristephanon,” 4: 546 (vv. 48–63); the English translation is taken from Loeb.

13  Isabel Velázquez, Hagiografía y culto a los santos en la Hispania visigoda: aproximación a sus manifestaciones literarias (Mérida, 2005), 147–49.

14  Pedro Castillo, Los mártires hispanorromanos y su culto en la historia de la Antigüedad tardía (Granada, 1999), 297ff.

15  “Exult for the pleasant help of the three, whose protection favours all the villages of the lands of the Pyrenees” (Exultare tribus libet patronis/ quorum praesidio fouemur omnes/ terrarum populi Pyrenearum). Cited from Prudencius, “Peristephanon,” 6:602 (vv. 145–147). 16  “Laid within sight of their papales, this maiden watches over the well-being of Rome’s citizens and also protects the strangers who plead with pure and faithful heart” (Conspectu in ipso condita

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by Peter Brown (among others)—17 an ideo­logical transference of the prevailing social paradigm during the late Roman Empire and of its forms of personal subjection. Beyond that, what is interesting to note is the way in which those saints (through their relics) not only assure that protection but can also give cohesion to a human group through a memory to be shared (i.e., the passion of those sacrificed in that same place) and an object that keeps that tradition alive. Moreover, the key observation is that what was mainly being emphasized during this early period in the cult of relics was the fact that the remains belong to saints martyred in the same place where their relics were kept. This began to change later, with their relocation to other places, which helps destroy this close identification and will require a new series of arguments to demonstrate the new relationship created between the saint and the final resting place of his or her bones— or of other associated items. This displacement of relics, united with the desire to destroy a local memory and create instead a new one, plays a central role in the remains of St. Eulalia, according to the Vitas sanctorum Patrum emeretensium, originally written during the first half of the seventh century. In her case, it was not the martyress’s bones but her tunic which King Leovigild ordered to bring to him upon the refusal of the bishop of the city, Masona, to convert to Arianism. The text states that the king’s aim was to keep the holy cloth “in the basilica of the Arian heresy there in Toledo.”18 The refusal of the bishop led the monarch to send messengers to Mérida to find the tunic, but with no success. After the king threatened him again, Bishop Masona told Leovigild: “I have burned the tunic in fire, reduced it to ashes and into a liquid, and mixed with water I drank it,” and touching his stomach with his hand he said, “Look! Here it is since reduced to ashes I drank it […].” This is said because without anyone knowing so, he had folded it and wrapped it in linen cloths and wound it about his stomach under his clothes and wore it thus.19

turrium/ seruat salutem uirgo Quiritium/ nec non et ipsos protegit aduenas/ puro ac fideli pectore supplices). Cited from Prudencius, “Peristephanon,” 14 (vv. 3–6).

17  Peter Brown, Le culte des saints. Son essor et sa fonction dans la chrétienté latine (Paris, 1984), 89ff.; Pedro Castillo, “El valor representativo, ejemplar y didáctico de mártires y santos en la Antigüedad tardí�a,” in Santos, obispos y reliquias, ed. Luis Garcí�a Moreno, Marí�a Elvira Gil, Sebastián Rascón, and Margarita Vallejo (Alcala de Henares, 2003), 147–53, who considers the exemplary and didactic character of martyrial passiones in early Christianity. A reference to the role of saints as protectors through their relics can be found in Edina Bozoky, La politique des reliques de Constantin à Saint Louis (Paris, 2006), 36.

18  “Quam in baselicam Arriane prauitatis ibidem in Toleto habere deueret.” Cited from Antonio Maya, ed., Vitas sanctorum Patrum emeretensium (Turnhout, 1992), 65. For the characteristics and date of composition of the work, see the introduction to that edition, 55ff.; Isabel Velázquez, in her edition of the story, proposes a primitive redaction from 633–638 and a later reworking made between 666 and 681. Isabel Velázquez, Vidas de los santos Padres de Mérida (Madrid, 2008), 11–15. See also Velázquez, Hagiografía, 177–201. 19  “‘Quia tunicam ipsam igne conbussi pulberesque ex ea feci et in licorem, aque permixtos bibi’. Et tactu manus sue contrectans stomacum suum dicebat: ‘Euidenter cognoscere quia in pulberes redacta bibi illam […]’. Hoc autem ideo dicebat, quia nullo sciente sibi eam in stomaco plicatam infra sua indumenta linteis inuolutam precinxerat.” Cited from Vitas sanctorum, ed. Maya, 68.

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Clearly, the goal was to dispossess the city of its relic and transfer it to the new Visigothic centre of power—which later, given the failure of this attempt, needed to find its own martyr in the figure of St. Leocadia.20 The cycle of the Hispanic passionario strays little from this template. Numerous testimonies in it narrate the acquisition and circulation of martyrs’ relics.21 For instance, we are told the story of St. Vincent (of whom I will speak more later), whose body was thrown into the sea but miraculously came back to the coast, with a widow informed of the exact place where it could be found.22 In this case, the story declared that the corpse was finally buried under the altar in the cathedral of Valencia, the city of his martyrdom, “a place consecrated to God by devotion and venerated through its concealed things (mysteriis).”23 However, it is also said that the body of Vincent was, from an early stage, subject to much manhandling because the translation of his relics to many places helped to further enhance his cult.24 Indeed, remains and objects belonging to St. Vincent and distributed throughout the kingdom of the Franks are mentioned from an early date. This endowed the martyr with an enormous popularity, which was later exploited to sustain certain ecclesiastical aspirations which in turn highlighted Vincent’s antiquity and fame. The need to own relics to assert local identity led to many communities sharing the memory of the same saint. This happened with the martyrs Servandus and Germanus, killed at Cadiz. The hagio­grapher who composed their passio in the eighth century judged that “God’s grace pours out a great light, so that the diocese of Cadiz is illuminated by such an extraordinary gift through the passion of these martyrs, which was the only [diocese] lacking such a glory.”25 The hagio­grapher later added: The great cities of Hispalis and Emerita benefited from the gift of their martyrdom. In fact, the fertile soil of Emerita took the body of Germanus, which was given a most splen-

20  Céline Martin, La géo­graphie du pouvoir dans l’Espagne visigothique (Lille, 2003), 215–16.

21  For this issue, I refer the reader to Ariel Guiance, “Santos, reliquias y milagros en la hagiografí�a visigoda,” Pecia. Ressources en médiévistique 8, no. 11 (2005): 245–60.

22  Á� ngel Fábrega, Pasionario hispánico, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1953), 2:187–96. This is a text from the late fourth century, contemporary to the hymn composed by Prudentius and dedicated to the same saint. Prudencius, “Peristephanon,” 1:92–107; and also Carmen Garcí�a Rodrí�guez, El culto de los santos en la España romana y visigoda (Madrid, 1966), 257ff.

23  “Mancipatum Deo deuotione locum, et mysteriis venerabile.” Cited from Fábrega, Pasionario hispánico, 2:195. 24  “Help from his body was found in many places. When carrying out celebrations in these places, its intercessory function is extended” (ita quod in plurimis locis refectio eius corporis fuit. Hoc ad celebranda ipsius ampliora pertinet vota). Cited from Fábrega, Pasionario hispánico, 2:195–96. Pedro Castillo, “Reliquias y lugares santos: una propuesta de clasificación jerárquica,” Florentia Iliberritana. Revista de estudios de la Antigüedad clásica 8 (1997): 39–54; for St. Vincent, see 48ff. 25  “Divina gratia magnum lumen infundit, ut conventus gaditano tanto divino munere inlustraretur martyrum passione, qui solus tantam gloriam indigere videbatur.” Cited from Fábrega, Pasionario hispánico, 2:357. See also Fábrega, Pasionario hispánico, 1:161–64 for the characteristics and dating of this tale. Also Garcí�a Rodrí�guez, El culto de los santos, 236–39.

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did burial next to Eulalia and other martyrs. The body of Servandus, solemnly buried, rests in the graveyard of Hispalis between the blessed martyresses Iusta and Rufina.26

We can see here how the shared memory of a place of martyrdom and (later on) of inhumation contributed to dignify certain places, making the saint an indispensable means of narrating a glorious past and, at the same time, offering obvious divine protection.

The Great Hispanic translationes and the Need to Explore the Past

This argumentative tradition (tying the figure of a saint to a particular space, a venerated remembrance, and a place sublimated by that figure) was extensively employed by hagio­graphic literature throughout the Middle Ages. In the Hispanic case, this probably reached its apogee with a series of relocations of relics from the eleventh century onwards, contemporary to the great territorial expansion of Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula. Tales were composed to refer to and celebrate these translationes; stories that narrated the circumstances (real or imaginary) that surrounded those events and that, at the same time, clearly express the specific interests sought by the promoters of each of them. In particular, mention should be made of the recovery and subsequent transfer of St. Isidore’s remains from Seville to Leon; the travels of the Arca santa from Oviedo (which supposedly happened in several stages during the seventh century but was recorded for the first time only at the end of the eleventh); the translatio of St. Felix (also from the same period); and the relocation of the martyrs Nunilón and Alodia (based on a tradition from the ninth century but also written at the end of the eleventh).27 From the twelfth century we can date the version of Bishop Pelagius of Oviedo’s journey of the Arca santa and the translatio of St. Vincent to Lisbon. The most remarkable case from that group (and the one that should probably be counted as a trigger for this particular cycle of translationes) is the one about St. Isidore, transported from Seville to the new capital of the then Christian kingdom, the city of Leon. In fact, Isidore did not have a cult as such until after this transfer which was organized by Ferdinand I in 1063. From this point onwards there was a clear intention to turn Isidore into a sort of “national” Hispanic saint (with all the necessary caveats), the keeper of the tradition, and a symbol of past glories.28 Shortly after the translation, an 26  “Spalensium et Emeretensium urbes magne sunt eorum passionis gratiam consequuente: siquidem Germani corpus Emeretensis altrix terra suscepit, quod iuxta Eulaliam ceterosque martyres in cimiterio datum est honestissime sepulture. Servandi vero corpus, in cimiterio Spalensi inter Iustam et Rufinam beatissimas martyres sepultum, cum honori quiescit.” Cited from Fábrega, Pasionario hispánico, 1:161–64.

27  Juan Gil, “En torno a las santas Nunilón y Alodia,” Revista de la Universidad de Madrid 19 (1970): 103–40 (the acts on the translation are at 134–40). Luis Girón-Negrón dates them to the ninth century in his “‘Como a cuerpo santo’: el prólogo del Zifar y los furta sacra hispano-latinos,” Bulletin Hispanique 103, no. 2 (2001): 345–68, esp. 352–55.

28  Ariel Guiance, “Nacionalismos hagiográficos: la idea de España en la hagiografí�a alto­medieval hispana,” Temas Medi­evales 11 (2003): 171–205; and Carlos de Ayala, Sacerdocio y reino en la España altomedi­eval. Iglesia y poder político en el Occidente peninsular, siglos vii–xii (Madrid, 2008), 286–88.

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unknown author wrote nine lectiones, undoubtedly for use in the Mass.29 In the first reading, the author appealed to a topic that will be extensively employed in this kind of narrative: the loss of Spain, seventy-five years after the death of St. Isidore, at the hands of the Saracens. According to the text, the sins of Roderic—“having neglected the divine religion” (neglecta religione divina)—caused this disaster, which would lead to the ruin of monasteries, the destruction of bishoprics, the burning of holy books, and the despoiling of church treasures.30 It was Pelagius’s rebellion at the Cave of St. Maria with the help of the “divine hand” (divina manus) that began to restore the situation.31 After this, the translatio praised the (Visi)Gothic lineage to forge a link to the person who will be the main protagonist in the future: Ferdinand I. He—of “illustrious ancestry”—is the one who asks the King of Seville, Ibn Abbad, for the remains of the local martyress, St. Justa, for which he sends an embassy comprising, among others, two bishops (Alvito of Leon and Ordoño of Astorga).32 The sequence of events then follows patterns common to this hagio­graphical genre: the relics of St. Isidore are not easy to find due to the lack of collaboration from the Muslims; Alvito urges prayer and makes invocations for three days; on the fourth day, St. Isidore appears in his dreams saying that his remains—and not those of St. Justa—will be translated to Leon; there is a new apparition of the saint, to the incredulity of the bishop (a vision that will be repeated a third time, indicating the exact place that must be excavated); then resistance by Muslims to handing over the holy remains; the exhumation of the relics (with an extensive repertoire of miracles); the relocation to Leon by bishop Ordoño (because Alvito was by now dead, fulfilling a prophecy revealed by Isidore himself); and, finally, we encounter the placement of the relics in the Basilica of John the Baptist, commissioned by Ferdinand I. In this entire passage, the Castilian–Leonese monarchy, direct heir of the Visigothic royalty, is presented 29  Isidorus Hispalensis, Opera omnia, Patro­logiae cursus completus. Series latina, ed. JacquesPaul Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1862), 81: col. 39–43; Patrick Henriet, “Un exemple de religiosité politique: Saint Isidore et les rois de León (xie–xiiie siècles),” in Fonctions sociales et politiques du culte de saints dans les sociétés de rite grec et latin au Moyen Âge et à l´époque moderne. Approche comparative, ed. Marek Derwich and Michel Dimitriev (Wrocław, 1999), 77–95, esp. 80ff.; and Javier Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad en la España medi­eval. Castilla y León (siglos XI-XIII) (Huelva, 2002), 40ff.

30  “That tempest broke over all Spain and swept away the monasteries, destroyed the bishoprics, burned on the pyre all the books of sacred law, scattered the treasures of the churches and consumed all inhabitants by iron, flames or hunger” (Ea tempestate omnis Hispania luxit monasteria in se eversa, episcopia destructa, libros sacrae legis igne combustos, thesauros ecclesiarum direptos, omnes incolas ferro, flamma, fame comsumptos). Cited from Isidorus Hispalensis, Opera omnia, 81: col. 40a-b (Lectiones I). 31  Patrick Henriet, “Le jour où la ‘Reconquête’ comença: jeux d´écritures et glissements de sens autour de la bataille de Covadonga (viiie–xiiie siècles),” in Faire l´événement au Moyen Age: de l’événement au fait historique, ed. Claude Carozzi and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi (Aix-en-Provence, 2007), 41–58, who notices the possible French origin of the author of the text and the fact that it diminishes the significance of the battle of Covandonga.

32  The participation of the bishop of Astorga is attested in a document from 1063, in which the monarch thanks him for his actions in the relocation of the saint’s remains. Pilar Blanco, Colección diplomática de Fernando I (Leon, 1987), 173–75 (document 67). See also Ayala, Sacerdocio y reino, 288.

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as the only one able to recover the relics of the best-known saint of the time, St. Isidore. In other words, the notion is implied that, just as Isidore had been a paradigmatic saint for all Hispania, so should Ferdinand be king of all Hispania. At the same time, a number of circumstances that reveal other constants of the era become evident. On the one hand, St. Isidore’s translatio is part of Ferdinand I’s interventionist policy into Muslim territories. In fact, his advances on the kingdom of Seville led him to demand the body of St. Justa, an event that (as we saw) led in turn to the finding of Isidore.33 On the other hand, he endowed Leon with sacred relics, necessary in a city that intended to be the new centre of the monarchy and that had been despoiled of its local martyr, St. Froilan, at the end of the tenth century (bones that were not recovered until the end of the twelfth century).34 At the same time, the swap of St. Justa for Isidore avoided the thorny issue of the translatio of the former, thus keeping her “territorial meaning” (local patronage) intact.35 Moreover, as much research has shown, a new pole of sacrality was established in opposition to the aspirations of Compostela, whose scriptorium was very active at this time. Finally, and this is of particular interest here, a story that mixed history and hagio­graphy was achieved, spanning from the Visigoths to the reign of Ferdinand I. In this depiction, the memory of the past was used first to build a coherent narrative of Iberian history and then to legitimate the new power which resulted from the centuries of that evolution, one that was adequately mediated by episcopal influence, symbolized by the figure of Isidore.36 It becomes clear, in this light, why the translatio begins with the evocation of the Iberian past and the great glories of old, framing all this within divine action, with Spain at its core. The repercussions of this text were immediate. As Patrick Henriet rightly noted, “Cette [...] œuvre fixe donc pour la postérité les grandes lignes du voyage entre Séville et León.”37 A later text was based on this discourse and reaffirmed the role of Isidore as the glorious saint of the Hispanic past. From it two principles were proposed: on the one hand, the bases of political legitimation of local royalty; on the other, the idea of Leon as the centre of Iberia. So, by the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, the anonymous Historia translationis corporis sancti Isidori was written following the cited lectiones.38 Here the author sought to unite, in a permanent way, three elements: the figure of 33  Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad, 42.

34  Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medi­eval Spain (Oxford, 1993), 128 and 174. Linehan himself notices that this translation reveals the scarce interest of Ferdinand I in occupying Seville, given the profitability of the system of parias. 35  Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad, 43.

36  The relationship between Hispanic historio­graphy and hagio­graphy has been analyzed in Patrick Henriet, “Hagio­graphie et historio­graphie en Péninsule Ibérique (xie–xiiie siècles). Quelques remarques,” Cahiers de linguistique hispanique médiévale 23 (2000): 53–85 (he considers the case of Isidore at 75–79). 37  Henriet, “Un exemple de religiosité politique,” 80.

38  Manuel Dí�az y Dí�az dates it to the thirteenth century in his Index scriptorum latinorum Medii Aevi hispanorum (Madrid, 1959), 257–58 n. 1194; Juan Antonio Estévez dates it to the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth centuries in his edition of the text: Chronica hispana saeculi

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Isidore, the city of Leon, and the supremacy of Leon over all Spain. To achieve that end, the author used several strategies. In the first place, and as the redactor of the lectiones, Isidore was usually presented as “doctor of all the Spains.”39 Secondly, it emphasized that the work of the saint covered the entire peninsula, pointing out, for instance, that Isidore eliminated the Arian heresy. His influence went well beyond that of bishop, such that his monastic rule was imposed on the whole clergy under the king’s jurisdiction (Yspanie clerus) by Alfonso III.40 In parallel the author builds an encomium of the city of Leon, linking the historical past of the city with the newly arrived saint. Indeed, the city is said to be favoured by the Hispanic kings from antiquity, because it was a noble and famous royal seat and was glorified by Isidore, first of its confessors, as a patron saint.41 In this passage, Isidore’s role as patron saint reappears once again, although not as a person embedded in local memory but one whose relics had been arbitrarily placed there, under a (fictional) notion of historical continuity. That appeal to the past via Isidore also served to present Leon as the seat of the new unified Hispanic nation, based on his ties with Seville, creating an axis between both cities. In fact, the city in Andalucí�a was the first metropolitan seat in Hispania, a city settled by “king Hispán,” whose name the city took.42 This generated a direct link to Leon’s aspirations of becoming the primary see (appealing to Seville as the city that had formerly been the prime see, but whose most glorious bishop now rested in the Castilian city), while rejecting any other city’s claims to this status. Whereas Leon looked to the Visigothic past to support its intentions, other ecclesiastical communities followed Leon’s path, if on a much smaller scale. So, during the same period, the monks at St. Millan de la Cogolla (a monastery incorporated into Alfonso VI’s domains, a monarch who had reduced royal favours to the monastery)43 conducted the translatio of St. Felix, master of St. Millan (Aemilianus). This translation, dated to 1090, xiii, ed. Luis Charlo Brea, Juan Antonio Estévez, and Rocí�o Carande (Turnhout, 1997), 134–37. Henriet assigns it to the twelfth century in Henriet, “Un exemple de religiosité politique,” 79.

39  Juan Antonio Estévez, “Historia translationis sancti Isidori,” in Chronica hispana saeculi xiii, ed. Charlo, Estévez, and Carande, 143–79 (citations are from 143, 144, 152, 162, 165 (two quotations), 169 and 170). See also Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad, 192ff. 40  “King Alfonso establshed that both they [the community of Santiago de Compostela] and all the clergy in Spain lived under the rules of Saint Isidore” (rex Adefonsus […] secundum sancti patris Ysidori regulam uiuerent, tam ipsi quam omnis Yspanie clerus statuit). Cited from Estévez, “Historia translationis sancti Isidori,” 147. 41  “That city of Leon, in those ancient times was loved by the kings of Spain, because it was the seat of the kings, noble and famous, and the first to honour the confessor Isidore as a venerated patron” (Ex quibus Legionensis civitas, a priscis temporibus Yspaniensium dilecta regibus, quia erat regalis sedes, nobilis et famosa, praecipuum confessorem Ysidorum gloriatur se uenerari patronum). Cited from Estévez, “Historia translationis sancti Isidori,” 143.

42  “Seville (Hispalia) and Sevillan (hispalense) gave brilliance to the first metropolitan see, and from its name that of Spain derived [Hispania], and so the Spanish king populated the city” (Yspali […] Yspaniensiumque prima sedes fulgebat metropolitana, a qua nomen traxit Hispania, ab Yspano rege urbs populata). Cited from Estévez, “Historia translationis sancti Isidori,” 144. 43  Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad, 46.

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led to the creation of a series of acts written shortly after the event.44 These do not begin by resorting to some ancient past but to more recent events: Alfonso VI’s military campaigns, the conquest of Toledo, and the restoration of its archiepiscopal seat. The text praises the great deeds of Alfonso, which ended in the capture of that city.45 Besides that, the discovery of St. Felix’s relics followed a much more “realistic” path than Isidore’s revelatory visions, even if later it was through a dream that the exact location of Felix’s burial was disclosed. In this particular case, the abbot of St. Millan, Blas, learned about the saint and his tomb reading the vita by Braulio of Zaragoza.46 Given that the saint’s resting place was difficult to access (inaccesibili difficultate), Blas decided to translate St. Felix to his monastery. However, despite having Alfonso VI’s authorization, this did not take place immediately. The story went on to describe a long list of circumstances that revived the project (including the Almoravid menace) and the negotiations between the community, the count who controlled the castle where the relics were kept, and the monarch. In Pérez-Embid’s words, the hagio­grapher “depicts a hierarchy of the government over the territory in which abbot’s jurisdictional authority remained subrogated to ruler’s authority over La Rioja; this was subrogated to king’s authority and the latter to the saint.”47 To this hierarchical chain we can add, as a first link, the one that tied the monks to the abbot at Millan, articulating a well-defined scale of agents and dependency. Clearly, the recovery of the precious relics was based on a past event, laid out in this case in an ancient vita, which tied St. Millan to St. Felix, triggered the entire action, and tended to raise the hierarchical importance of the monastery by increasing the total amount of relics associated (in some way or other) with it. By the way, it should be remembered that the monks at St. Millan appealed in their arguments to something that nobody could question: their customary practice of reading ancient manu­scripts, a distinctive trait of a community which prided itself in having a robust library. We can also find examples outside Castile–Leon of this manipulation of the past used to justify the possession or acquisition of relics. For instance, the fantastic tale of the translation of the two martyresses from the Muslim era, Nunilon and Alodia, to the mon44  Manuel Risco, ed., Las antiguedades civiles y eclesiasticas de Calahorra, España sagrada. Teatro geográfico-histórico de la Iglesia de España 33 (Madrid, 1781), 439–49. I have discussed this example in an earlier text: Ariel Guiance, “Entre la hagiografí�a y la historiografí�a: la ‘translatio’ de san Felices de Bilibio,” in Legendario cristiano: creencias y espiritualidad en el pensamiento medi­ eval, ed. Ariel Guiance (Buenos Aires, 2014), 229–57 (which I briefly summarize here). 45  Jocelyn Hillgarth, The Visigoths in History and Legend (Toronto, 2009), 87.

46  “He knew that there was a hermit named Felix, a very holy man who then lived in the [district of the] castle of Bilbio, to whom he offered himself as a disciple, if he was not without merit” (Dictauerat ei fama esse quendam heremitam nomine Felicem, uirum sanctissimum cui se non inmerito praeberet discipulum, qui tunc morabatur in castellum Bilibium.) The text continued: “there the prudent abbot found the feats of St. Emilius that a man of God, the presbyter Felix, took to the Lord in the castle of Bilbio.” (Hic itaque abba prudens reperiens in beati Aemiliani gestis, virum Dei Felicem presbyterum in castro Bilibiensi, migrasse ad Dominum). Cited from Manuel Risco, ed., Las antiguedades civiles y eclesiásticas de Calahorra, España sagrada 33, 14.

47  dibuja una jerarquización del gobierno del territorio en el que la autoridad jurisdiccional del abad quedaba subrogada a la del tenente de La Rioja, la de éste al rey y la de éste al santo. Cited from Perez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad, 49.

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astery of Leyre (supposedly ca. 880). In this case, to justify the finding of the remains of two saints whose bodies, according to their passio, were thrown into a pit in an unknown place, the monks created a tradition that involved the first dynasties of Navarra. In fact, it was the pleas of Queen Oneca, the wife of Iñigo Arista (considered the first King of Pamplona) that inspired churchmen to try and recover these relics.48 To that end, a fabulous dream intervened once again, making known to a certain Auriato the location of the precious bones. Once these were found, and after a series of incidents (which include a struggle to confirm them as the martyresses’ bones), they were moved in the presence of Iñigo Arista, bishop Gulgesindus of Pamplona, and abbot Fortun.49 This shows again, as we saw with Ferdinand I with St. Isidore or Alfonso VI with Felix, how the monarchy was actively engaged in the translatio of saintly relics, and demonstrates the need to show the antiquity of a monastic foundation and the royal patronage it enjoyed. It is irrelevant if events happened as told. What remained meaningful was the use of the past to achieve a specific goal, linking the facts to some glorious era (in this case, the beginnings of the Kingdom of Navarre). This narrative agrees, in other respects, with the historical tradition created in Navarra itself. The Navarrese tradition was indifferent to the Leonese Visigothism and aimed to demonstrate that all the Iberian kingdoms were at one level (another reason to reject the monopoly over the Gothic past that Leon strove to impose).50 Likewise, it offered some distinctive traits to the genre of translationes, such as the participation of women in the recovery of relics, with Oneca being presented as a new St. Helen. Moving onto the twelfth century, the will to create a particular historical consciousness from certain holy objects and to root social cohesion in a more or less distant past finds a paradigmatic example in the translation of St. Vincent from Valencia to Lisbon. In this case, the relocation was surrounded by confusing events and religious rivalry. The trigger came again from the monarchy, through the actions of Alfonso Henriquez. He was the first to establish a monastery under the name of the saint after his conquest of Lisbon, in the mid-twelfth century, ignoring, interestingly, other martyrs traditionally linked with Lisbon. It seems that Alfonso opted for a saint that was popular in France, paying respect to the spiritual traditions of his Burgundian ancestors.51 In this way, “A preference for S. Vincent, although he did not belong to the local tradition, might be a result from the change of the ruling milieu, from the court and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, shortly after 48  “A queen called Oneca was the worthy inspiration for the bodies of the holy virgins to be diligently cared for” (inspirare dignatus est cuidam regine nomine Onece ut sanctarum corpora uirginum perquireret solicite). Cited from Gil, “En torno a las santas,” 136.

49  “Eneco, most serene king, and Gulgesindus most dignified bishop priest of God, invited the abbot of Leyre with many other abbots and priests, as well as also innumerable members of the catholic people” (Quibus Eneco rex serenissimus et Guilgesindus episcopus sacerdos Dei dignissimus a Legerensi abbati inuitati cum multis aliis abbatibus et sacerdotibus necnon innumerabilibus catolicorum populus). Cited from Gil, “En torno a las santas,” 140. 50  Hillgarth, The Visigoths, 99.

51  Pedro Picoito, “O rei, o santo e a cidade. O culto de São Vicente em Lisboa e o projecto polí�tico de Afonso Henriques,” in São Vicente, diácono e mártir, ed. Isabel Alçada Cardoso (Lisbon, 2005), 57–87, esp. 69, summarizing Irisalva Moita’s conclusions; and Garcí�a Rodrí�guez, El culto de los santos, 260ff., on the relics of the saint and their spreading inside and outside the Iberian Peninsula.

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the conquest of the city.”52 In any case, the tale of his translation (written by a cathedral canon, Esteban, during the last quarter of the twelfth century) indicates that the remains of the martyr were placed “in a very remote place to the west, which in Latin is called the Cape of St. Vincent of the Raven,” a displacement that was caused, like others, by the Muslim invasion.53 The site was later conquered by the Saracens, who captured two children living there. They are the ones who tell Alfonso Henrí�quez about the existence of the remains (once again, we find someone who cherishes the memory of a saint), news that prompted the monarch to action. It is only later that some unknown men travelled to the site and, through divine inspiration, obtained the relics. Pedro Picoito has interpreted this discovery (which happened in the absence of any secular or ecclesiastical authorities) as a reaction of Mozarabic groups in Lisbon against the Gregorian reforms.54 If we accept that opinion, the control of these relics against ecclesiastical reform can be placed in parallel with a satirical text produced in the Kingdom of Leon. In the satire all the opposition to the reform appears precisely in the story of the fabulous relics of Sts. Albino and Rufino, with an image of the church’s greed and a scathing critique of Cluniac dominance.55 If we are right, relics appeared as a favoured resource to demonstrate the sense of belonging to a particular historical community and the illustrious past to which it refers. But let us return to the case of St. Vincent. It is interesting for our analysis that, on the one hand, he appears to be destined to Lisbon from the beginning. According to the hagio­grapher, it is “because he [Vincent] enjoyed being worshipped mostly by the people of Lisbon while the King intended to place him in Braga or Coimbra, because Divine Mercy did not yet grant him Lisbon.”56 On the other hand, and beyond a supposed transPyrenean devotion, it is suggestive that, when resorting to a hagio­graphical tradition to extol a recently conquered city and the nascent monarchy, one of the oldest Hispanic martyrs—and one of the best known both inside and outside Iberia—was chosen. So, if Castilians drew upon their Visigothic past, it is not so strange if Lusitanians—like the 52  A preferência por S. Vicente, ainda que fora da tradição local, poderá derivar da alteração do meio dirigente, a partir da corte e da hierarquia eclesiástica logo após a conquista da cidade. Cited from Aires Nascimento, Saul António Gomes, San Vicente de Lisboa e seus milagres medi­evales (Lisbon, 1988), 9–10. 53  “In uiri religiosi tuciorum loca querentes in loco remotissimo uersus occidente, qui latine dicitur ad capud sancti Vicentii de coruo.” Cited from Esteban de Lisboa, Traslatio et miracula S. Vicente, ed. Alexandre Herculano, Portugaliae Monumenta Historica, Scriptores 1 (Lisbon, 1866), 96. A more accurate edition can be found in Aires Nascimento, S. Vicente de Lisboa: legendas, milagres e culto litúrgico (testemunhos latinomedievais) (Lisbon, 2011), 92–124.

54  Pedro Picoito, “A Trasladação de S. Vicente. Consenso e Conflito na Lisboa do século XII,” Medi­ evalista on line 4 (2008), www2.fcsh.unl.pt/iem/medi­evalista/MEDIEVALISTA4/PDF4/picoitoPDF.pdf, accessed November 30, 2019. 55  Rodney M. Thomson, ed., Tractatus Garsiae or the Translation of the Relics of SS. Gold and Silver (Leiden, 1973); and Maurilio Pérez González, ed., La Garcineida. Estudio y edición crítica con traducción (Leon, 2001).

56  “Quia sibi placitum fuerat ab ulixbonensi populo pocius venerari: et e contra Regis animus bracare seu colimbrie, si repertum referret, condere proponebat, presertim cum necdum pietas diuina sibi contuletit uilixbonam.” Cited from Esteban de Lisboa, “Traslatio et miracula,” 96.

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Navarrese before them—sought to differentiate themselves by claiming a past (hoping to demonstrate their distinct identity) that went much further back and so adopted a martyr from the early fourth century, regardless of this translation having been made by Alfonso Henriquez or by groups threatened by new religious or hierarchical trends.57 Oviedo is the epitome of a city that uses antiquity to legitimate certain aspirations by building an uninterrupted memory of facts and objects through its famous Arca santa of relics. They intended to anchor the prestige of its see not with famous Mozarabic martyrs, nascent peninsular monarchs, or Visigothic or Roman pasts. They planned to go directly to the birth of Christianity and, from there, to show the unique tie between Oviedo and Jerusalem.58 Let us briefly summarize the stages of this tradition. The tradition seems to have originated in the first third of the eleventh century, maybe through bishop Ponce of Tabernoles.59 We have to wait until the end of that same century to observe a solid cult of the relics preserved in Oviedo. From that time (even if this dating might need revision) we have a short catalogue detailing the content of the Arca, also mentioning other remains venerated at the church of St. Salvador in Oviedo. Probably produced outside Iberia but following a Hispanic model, this text also discusses the age of the Arca, stating that it was built “in imperishable wood by the disciples of the Apostles” and carried from “Jerusalem to Africa, from Africa to Cartagena, from Cartagena to Toledo, from Toledo to Asturias, to the church of San Salvador, in the place called Oviedo.”60 The inventory of the Ark enumerates four broad groups of relics. First, there is a large number of remains linked with Christ: a fragment of the Cross,61 traces of the Holy Sepulchre, part of the

57  Hillgarth, The Visigoths, 100.

58  A very detailed study of the tradition of the Arca santa can be found in Raquel Alonso Á� lvarez, “‘Patria uallata, asperitate moncium.’ Pelayo de Oviedo, el ‘archa’ de las reliquias y la creación de una topografí�a regia,” Locus amoenus 9 (2007–2008): 17–29 (whose conclusions I summarize partially in the following pages). 59  Soledad Suárez Beltrán, “Los orí�genes y expansión del culto a las reliquias de San Salvador de Oviedo,” in Las peregrinaciones a Santiago de Compostela y San Salvador de Oviedo en la Edad Media. Actas del congreso internacional celebrado en Oviedo del 3 al 7 de diciembre de 1990, ed. Juan Ignacio Ruiz de la Peña (Oviedo, 1993), 37–55 (the reference is on 38ff.), who admits an early cult from the ninth century onwards. Alonso Á� lvarez sees it instead as beginning in the eleventh, Alonso, “Patria uallata,” 18. On the figure of Ponce de Tabernoles, see Ayala, Sacerdocio y reino, 255–56.

60  “Arcam, de lignis imputribilibus a discipulis apostolorum factam, innumeris dei magnaliis plenam, ab urbe Iherosolima transtulit in Affricam, ab Affrica in Chartaginem, a Chartagine in Toletum, a Toleto in Asturias in ecclesia sancti saluatoris, loco qui dicitur Ouetum.” Cited from Donatien de Bruyne, “Le plus ancien catalogue des reliques d’Oviedo,” Analecta bollandiana 45 (1927): 93–96 (quotation from 93–94). Close to this tradition is the one that explains the presence of some hair of the Vigin at the cathedral in Astorga. Some of that hair was requested from bishop Osmundo by Countess Ida of Boulogne at the end of the eleventh century. The bishop tells her that the hair was brought by seven disciples of Christ in their flight from Jerusalem to Toledo, where it was kept during the time of Muslim domination. Later on, the relics would be divided between Oviedo and Astorga: Badouin de Gaiffier, “Relations religieuses de l’Espagne avec le nord de la France. Transferts de reliques (viiie–xiie siècles),” in Recherches d’hagio­graphie latine, ed. Badouin de Gaiffier (Brussels, 1979), 7–29; and Badouin de Gaiffier, “Sainte Ide de Boulogne et l’Espagne. À� propos des reliques mariales,” Annalecta bollandiana 86 (1968): 67–82. 61  For an analysis of the remains of the Holy Cross in Spain see Á� ngeles Garcí�a de la Borbolla, “El

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Crown of Thorns and the Shroud, of the bread distributed during the Last Supper, of Christ’s tunic, of the stone covering the Sepulchre, of the palm leaf he held during his entry in Jerusalem, and so on.62 A second group comprises relics from biblical characters associated with Christ: hair and milk from the Virgin Mary, the right-foot sandal of St. Peter, hair from John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, earth from the tomb of Lazarus, bones from the Innocents. A third group, for its part, includes Old Testament items (namely, a fragment of the staff Moses was carrying during the crossing of the Red Sea, land from Mount Sinai on which he stepped, the bones of the three kids cast into the oven by Nebuchadnezzar), while the fourth group includes objects from different periods of Christian history: the pallium given to St. Ildefonso by the Virgin, blood from the image of Jesus defiled by Jews as known from the story of a Christ in Beirut that was popular in the Middle Ages, and bones from many martyrs, prophets, confessors, virgins, and other saints. To this marvellous content we have to add other relics preserved in the same basilica: amongst them the remains of saints Eulogius, Lucrecia, Eulalia from Mérida, Pelagius the martyr, Vincent, king Alfonso the Chaste, the so-called Cruz de los Á� ngeles,63 a fragment of the fishing basket of Peter and Andrew, and the tree-log which miraculously grew in order to build the basilica. There is also a curious reference to the remains of “St. Julian Pomerius, who transported the sarcophagus from Toledo to Oviedo,”64 confusing the sixth-century Gaulish author with the Toledan bishop from the seventh. This Arca santa again became a focus of attention around the end of the eleventh century, when king Alfonso VI proceeded to open it, as stated in a document dated March 1075, but which is considered by many to be a forgery of the early twelfth century.65 This text includes some important changes when compared with the earlier cataculto y devoción del lignum crucis en los reinos occidentales de la pení�nsula ibérica (vii–xv),” Pecia. Ressources en medievistique 8, no. 11 (2005): 565–600.

62  On the well-known Shroud preserved in Oviedo, see Francisco Javier Fernández Conde, “Las reliquias y el sudario de la Cámara santa de Oviedo. Religiosidad y poder,” in Castilla y el mundo feudal. Homenaje al profesor Julio Valdeón, ed. Marí�a Isabel del Val and Pascual Martí�nez Sopena, 3 vols. (Valladolid, 2009), 3:549–66.

63  On this topic, also connected with the sublimation of the see of Oviedo, see Raquel Alonso, “El origen de las leyendas de la Cruz de los ángeles y la Cruz de la victoria (catedral de Oviedo): ‘cruces gemmatae’ al servicio de la propaganda episcopal,” Territorio, Sociedad y Poder 5 (2010): 23–33. She traces the issue in the Historia silense and in the later reworkings by Pelayo. 64  “Sancti Iuliani Pomerii qui arcam ipsam a Toleto Ouetum transtulit.” Cited from Alonso, “El origen de las leyendas,” 95.

65  The document was published by Santos Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos de la catedral de Oviedo (Oviedo, 1962), 214–19 (document 72). It is assigned to the time of bishop Pelagius (first half of the twelfth century) in Bernard Reilly, “The Chancery of Alfonso VI of LeonCastile (1065–1109),” in Santiago, Saint-Denis and Saint Peter. The Reception of Roman Liturgy in Leon-Castile in 1080, ed. Bernard Reilly (New York, 1985), 7 n. 40; and Alfonso Gambra, Alfonso VI. Cancillería, curia e imperio. II. Colección diplomatica (Leon, 1988), 60–65. On the contrary, Raquel Alonso, “El Corpus pelagianum y el Liber testamentorum ecclesiae Oventensis: las ‘reliquias del pasado’ en la obra del obispo Pelayo de Oviedo (1101–1153),” in Texte et contexte. Littérature et histoire de l’Europe médiévale, ed. Marie-Françoise Alamichel and Robert Braid (Paris, 2011), 519–48, assigns it instead to a later period, because “This simple story does not seem to match

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logue: it omits that the Arca was built by the disciples of the apostles, stating instead that it was constructed in Toledo during the time of the Muslim invasion by gathering relics that came from different regions.66 It was, therefore, a local product that resulted from a historical event (the Islamic conquest), and whose past was not rooted beyond the eighth century. Likewise, it is added (in another passage unknown by the previous author) that a prior attempt was made to open the Ark during the time of the aforementioned bishop Ponce of Tabernoles, but “so much light came from it” that the brightneess thwarted sight of the content and forced the bishop to close it immediately. Thus the honour of the opening finally fell upon Alfonso VI, “the most faithful prince of Christ, chosen by God to show what has been hidden for so long.”67 The monarch takes the central role68 and is the one who verified the content of the sacred coffer. Its contents, detailed in a new inventory included in this document, is broader in scope than the one from the earlier text; it also relegates to a second place those remains associated with Christ while highlighting those related to the saints. Amongst the first, however, objects such as the fragments of the Cross, bread from the Last Supper, earth from the Holy Land, and the Shroud appear again while, at the same time, relics from five apostles (Peter, Paul, Thomas, Bartholomew, and Jude) and a repertoire of more than seventy saints, from Stephen Proto-Martyr (the symbol par excellence of martyrial hagio­graphy) to men killed during the Muslim era (such as Rogelio and Servideo), from inside and outside Iberia, are added. The Arca and its eighty-three samples of relics appear, then, as a sort of compendium of ecclesiastical history, organized around the most representative characters of Christendom. Oviedo housed the most comprehensive manifestation of the development of the catholic faith, a memory that was tangible through these rel[...] with the style of the bishop, much more fond of exoticism abd suprising details” (no parece coincidir este sencillo relato […] con el estilo del obispo, mucho más aficionado a exotismos y detalles sorprendentes) (531). Moreover, she argues that the plate coating of the “Ark cannot be later than 1102, in the time of Bishop Arias (Pelayo’s predecesor at the Oviedo see)” (Arca no puede ser posterior a 1102, coincidiendo con la época del obispo Arias [antecesor de Pelayo en la sede ovetense]) (Alonso, “Patria uallata,” 24).

66  “In those ancient times, when God omnipotent allowed that because of the Christians, the people of the Muslims sadly subjugated all Spain, five of the faithful from different places concerned themselves with taking and gathering in the city of Toledo all the relics of the Holy Fathers, and in an ark they placed them carefully to keep them safe these times” (Nam priscis temporibus cum Deus omnipotens propter culpam christianorum subjugassent totam pene hispaniam populo Ismaelitarum, omnes Sanctorum reliquias Patrum quinque fideles ex diversis locis subripere potuerunt apud Toletanam urbem congregantes, et in quadam archa studiose condentes, penes se aliquanto tempore tenuerunt). Cited from Manuel Risco, ed., Memorias de la Santa Iglesia exenta de Oviedo, España sagrada. Teatro geográfico-histórico de la Iglesia de España 38 (Madrid, 1793), 318.

67  “Thesaurum magnum honore venerandum, quod magna antiquitate in eadem Ecclesia manebat occultum, Christus ipse suo fidelissimo principe ad laudem et gloriam hominis suis voluit manifestare.” Cited from Risco, ed., Memorias de la Santa Iglesia exenta de Oviedo, España sagrada, 38: 318. The idea of the ignorance of those relics has been stressed by Alonso, “Patria uallata,” 22. 68  Suárez Beltrán, “Los orí�genes y expansión del culto,” 43. However, it might be necessary to tone down her opinions when she asserts that the opening of the Arca allows the figure of the king to “saliera enormemente magnificada, adquiriendo casi olor de santidad.”

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ics. Apart from Oviedo, Toledo bathed in its glory; in this version Toledo was no longer a transit point for the Arca but the place where all these famous remains were gathered to be (immediately) transferred to their final location. The connection with Jerusalem reappears in a text that undoubtedly belonged to the authorship of Pelagius of Oviedo, inserted in the Liber testamentorum of the city’s cathedral.69 It is possibly he who endows the legend of the Arca with its best historical contexts, combining historio­graphical and hagio­graphical aspects in equal amounts. After asserting the value that holy relics have for a devout Christian life, Pelagius underlined that the blessed see of Oviedo rejoiced in the multiple benefits its relics bring, indeed the protection and salvation of all Hispania.70 After this, he narrated the Persian invasion of the Byzantine Empire during the time of Phocas, defeats suffered by Heraclius, and the reign of his contemporary Sisebut in Hispania. In these circumstances, the author returned to the idea that the Arca was built in Jerusalem by the disciples of the apostles, from where it was carried first to Africa by a certain Philip, presbyter of Jerusalem, a colleague of presbyter Jerome.71 Later, it was taken by Fulgencio of Ruspe (a complete anachronism) to Toledo.72 In Toledo the Arca received “great veneration by the faithful under the different kings of Hispania, from the early period of king Sisebut till the death of king Roderic,”73 and was then transferred to Oviedo on the eve of the Muslim conquest of the Visigothic capital. This last relocation was undertaken by Julián, who is here identified—in another evident anachronism—with the bishop of Toledo instead of with Julian Pomerius. After this long journey (that the author tries to endow with historical verisimilitude), the symbolism of the Arca seeks to firmly establish its prestige employing deep biblical roots: Pelagius goes back to the Old Testament, demonstrating that, during the reign of Alfonso the Chaste, the coffer had remained in tents, just as the ark of the Lord 69  I follow the edition of Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos, 511–15 (document 217). A careful analysis, edition and French translation of the text can be found in Patrick Henriet, “Oviedo, Jérusalem hispanique au xiie siècle. Le récit de la translation de l’arca santa selon l’évêque Pélage d’Oviedo,” in Pèlerinages et lieux saints dans l’Antiquité et le Moyen Âge. Mélanges offerts à Pierre Maravall, ed. Béatrice Caseau, Jean-Claude Cheynet, and Vincent Deroche (Paris, 2006), 235–48. Pelagius wrote two versions of this account: the one just mentioned and a second, which appears in his interpolations to the Crónica de Alfonso III. For an overview of the similarities and differences between both redactions, see Alonso, “Patria uallata,” 24–25.

70  “Multiplici igitur sanctorum pignore felix letatur sedes Ovetensis […] totius Hispaniae presidio et saluti adsistentia.” Cited from Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos, 511–15 (document 217).

71  “Archa que a discipulis apostolorum fuit in Hierusalem facta […], ab Iherosolimis translata a Philippo, Iherosolimitano presbitero, collega Iheronimi presbiteri primo in Affrica […].” Cited from Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos, 511–15 (document 217). 72  “[…] de ob gentilium in ipsa Affrica invasionem factam, a Fulgentio, Ruspensis ecclesie affrigane episcopo, Tholeto est translata […]. Cited from Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos, 511–15 (document 217). Fulgencius lived between ca. 468 and ca. 533.

73  “Cum summa fidelium veneratione sedit, ab ipso tempore excellentissimi regis Sisebuti per succesiones regum Hispanie usque ad exitum vite Ruderici regis, quo in tempore est translate Oveto.” Cited from Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos, 511–15 (document 217).

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did before the building of the Temple.74 For the same reason, the monarch “like a new Salomon, [thought] to build a temple in which the mentioned ark would rest,” in reference to the Church of St. Salvador at Oviedo.75 Once the temple was built, “due to the safety of the place, but also due to the large number of iron chains [arranged by the king to protect it], he transported the glorious ark, believing that in this way he acted for the stability of his kingdom and the salvation of all of his people.”76 The ark, therefore, transformed the people of Hispania into a new chosen community, repeating the history of salvation, and making Oviedo a New Jerusalem.77 The final part of Pelagius’s tale reproduces the list of relics, an inventory that is closer in content to the supposed document about the opening during the reign of Alfonso VI than to the eleventh-century version (which, as previously stated, remains the most detailed regarding the content held in the basilica). What is interesting from Pelagius’s narrative is the way in which he constructs his tale by turning to different temporal contexts. The story of the ark appears to be adapted to a framework in which three types of memories are combined: the more or less immediate historical past, the epic or heroic, and the distant, mythical, legendary past. This construction is akin to the one used by noble lineages to build their own memory, as has been analyzed by É� ric Bournazel.78 In Pelagius’s narrative, the historical dimension concerns the last guarantor of the Arca, Alfonso II. He establishes “the see of the kingdom at Oviedo” and builds, as we have seen, the space where the sacred coffer was placed. The heroic era was related to Byzantine and Visigothic history, and to the events that happened immediately after the Muslim conquest. Here several figures are mixed, such as emperors Phocas and Heraclius; kings Sisebut, the atrocious Wittiza, and Roderic; bishops Fulgentius of Ruspe, Ildefonso, and Julian of Toledo (identified, as we saw, with the man who saved the Arca from its destruction at the hands of the Muslims). Finally, the legendary past is rooted in the Apostles (who created the Arca) and in figures such as Presbyter Philip, the companion of Jerome. To this last dimension also belongs the 74  “[H]is temporibus ipsa mansit archa in tabernaculis sicut et ipsa archa Domini ante hedi­ ficationem templi, usque ad regnum Adefonsi iunioris.” Cited from Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos, 511–15 (document 217).

75  “In hoc ipse, iam alter Salomon, cogitavit templum construere in quo pausaret que hactenus erat absque loci certudine premisse sanctitatis archa.” Cited from Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos, 511–15 (document 217).

76  “Ibi ob securitatem loci adhibitis multiplicitate servorum ferri, archam gloriosissimam transtulit hoc factum credens esse ad firmitatem sui regni et ad totius salutem populi.” Cited from Garcí�a Lagarreta, Colección de documentos, 511–15 (document 217). The version of the Crónica de Alfonso III written by Pelagius repeats this concept in identical terms. See Jean Prelog, Die Chronik Alfons’III. Untersuchung und kritische edition der vier Redaktionen (Bern, 1980), 94. See also Bozoky, La politique des reliques, 68 (who understands this issue as part of the ideo­logy of power and considers the use of relics in that light, but lacks a proper historical contextualization of the problem.

77  Henriet, “Hagio­graphie,” 69; and Alonso, “Patria uallata,” 25 (who correctly remarks that Serafí�n Moralejo was amongst the first scholars to study this analogy).

78  É� ric Bournazel, “Mémoire et parenté; le problème de la continuité dans la noblesse de l’an mil,” in La France de l’an mil, ed. Robert Delort (Paris, 1990), 111–15.

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projection even further back in time by means of a comparison between sacred arks, the buildings that preserve them, and their royal guardians. The version of the story of the Ark contained in the Chronicle of Alfonso II, interpolated by Pelagius himself, deserves a special note. As Alonso Á� lvarez has noticed, in this Chronicle “the story is no longer regarded as a complete narrative, but as an extended adventure for a long historical period in which every season is incorporated in every king’s realm.”79 In particular, the chronicle underlines that the sacred coffer arrives in Asturias in consonance with the uprising of king Pelagius,80 thus transforming them into Hyspanie presidio et salute adsitencia.81 In this way, a glorious event from the past (the supposed first uprising against Muslim rule) is merged with the patronage brought by the Arca, linking again history and historio­graphy (and simultaneously demeaning the role of James the Greater at Compostela).82 In so doing, bishop Pelagius demonstrated not only the hierarchical importance of the see at Oviedo but also its glorious antiquity (a policy that also led him to ascertain, for example, that Oviedo was not founded by the Goths but by a Catholic Vandal king, Gunderic, which allowed him to affirm its antiquity and demonstrate that his see had no trace of Arianism, unlike its rivals Toledo and Braga).83 At the same time, he carefully downplayed the role of the Visigothic capital in its relationship with relics (that were no longer brought together in Toledo, as in the earlier version of the tale), thus imposing “a mark of divine approval of the transfer of Toledo’s spiritual hegemony to Asturias.”84 Lastly in our tour of significant Iberian religious sites for relics, let us briefly turn and assess the situation in Toledo, the eventual victor in the struggle for episcopal primacy.85 Amidst the multiplication of cities with their own local saints and martyrs, Toledo promoted from a very early period (the beginning of the seventh century) the cult of the local saint Leocadia.86 However, the remains of the martyress were not in Toledo when the city was reconquered but had been apparently moved northwards; we should remember that Alfonso II had also built a place of worship to honour saint Leocadia in 79  El relato ya no se concibe como una narración completa sino a la manera de una peripecia prolongada durante un largo período histórico en la que cada estación queda incorporada al reinado del monarca correspondiente. Cited from Alonso, “Patria uallata,” 25.

80  “Pelagius and the ark saved by the saints which they took to Asturias” (Pelagium […] archam cum sanctorum pignoribus, quam in Asturiis transluterunt). Cited from Prelog, Die Chronik, 76. 81  Prelog, Die Chronik, 77.

82  Alonso, “Patria uallata,” 25. On James the Greater as the patron saint of Spain, see Fernando López Alsina, “‘Cabeza de oro refulgente de España’: los orí�genes del patrocinio jacobeo sobre el reino astur,” in Las peregrinaciones a Santiago de Compostela y San Salvador de Oviedo en la Edad Media. Actas del congreso internacional celebrado en Oviedo del 3 al 7 de diciembre de 1990, ed. Juan Ignacio Ruiz de la Peña (Oviedo, 1993), 27–36. 83  On this issue, see the careful study by Alonso, “El corpus pelagianum,” 522–28.

84  Linehan, History and the Historians, 99, emphasis retained from the original. Henriet, “Oviedo,” 238ff.

85  For the context of Toledo in the late eleventh century and its conflicts with the other seats, see: Ayala, Sacerdocio y reino, 323ff. 86  Garcí�a Rodrí�guez, El culto de los santos, 246–53.

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Oviedo.87 In any case, Toledo lacked any holy remains at the end of the eleventh century that could be used to legitimize its aspirations. The problem would be solved later, in an unsatisfactory manner, in the thirteenth century when, drawing maybe from an older tradition, an arm from St. Eugene was recovered.88 The origins of this saint are obscure and combine in equal measure history and legend. It may conflate a seventh-century bishop of the same name from Toledo and an unknown martyr who was supposedly worshipped from the eighth or ninth century. In fact, by the mid-ninth century a passio was composed in France using texts from a Visigothic ecclesiastical milieu, which suggests the author was indeed a Visigoth. In it Eugene is said to be a friend of Saint Denis (in turn identified with the character in the Acts of the Apostles, a follower of St. Paul). It is Denis himself who sent Eugene to predicate in Hispania, supposedly a regio magna. In particular, the text calls Toledo a very wise and excellent city, bathed by the Tajo, and supplied with countless goods.89 From then onwards, St. Eugene was seen as a first-century martyr, deeply influential in Hispanic religious history and linked to St. Paul (traits that would be carefully used later for specific goals). When in 1148 Pope Eugene III (purely coincidental name) summoned a council to Reims, the bishop attending from Toledo was Raymond of Sauvetât, successor of the famous Bernard, first bishop of the city after its reconquista. Raymond was in touch with one of the great French scholars of the time, Abbot Suger, who informed him about the relics of the supposed first archbishop of his seat. The Toledan bishop, always eager to build ties with the French90, tried to persuade Alfonso VII to reclaim those relics but died before achieving his goal. In any case, the relics ended up with King Louis VII, who brought them on his pilgrimage to Santiago as part of his recent matrimonial alliance with the Castilian court. From this tradition, Toledan ecclesiastical ideo­logy aimed during the thirteenth and fourteenth century to sweeten the legend of the translation of the arm of St. Eugene, composing a Traslatio brachii sanctu Eugenii Toletum,91 a

87  Richard Fletcher, Saint James’s Catapult. The Life and Times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela (Oxford, 1984), 61, who also considers the translatio of Saint Eulalia of Mérida from there to Oviedo. 88  Henriet, “Hagio­graphie,” 70ff. Also Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad, 141ff.

89  Juan Francisco Rivera, Los textos hagiográficos más antiguos sobre san Eugenio de Toledo (Toledo, 1963). The story of the passio appears in 29–44, while the references to Toledo are at 32–33: “Toledo, metropolitan city, is the most eminent among the cities of the realm, the most excellent of cities, with excellent banks of the River Tagus, which contains various types of abundant fish, good wines, and in the city they enjoy trees of apples, ample olives, as well as the vines in the district, and all the soil is happy to enjoy fertile fruit” (Toletum metropolis ciuitas est multo praeclarior caeterisque eiusdem regni urbibus excellentior, innitens litoribus Tagi fluminis diuersis generis piscibus exuberantes, uinetis uero atque uniuersarum pomis arborum situs urbis admodum gaudet, oliuetis denique affatim, utpote nostra regio uineis, omnique telluris fructuum fecunditate laetatur).

90  Ayala, Sacerdocio y reino, 328–29, who remembers the words of Dí�az y Dí�az regarding the way in which Raimundo “persecuted with rage everything that smelled of Hispanic tradition” (persiguió con saña cuanto olí�a a tradición hispánica). Manuel Dí�az y Dí�az, Manuscritos visigóticos del sur de la Península. Ensayo de distribución regional (Seville, 1995), 33.

91  “He would try to sweeten, in the 13th and 14th centuries, the legend of the transfer of the arm

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work which is noticeably different from the texts analyzed before. This translatio began with an allusion to the Muslim conquest and the desolation of Hispanic territory. As the reconquest progressed, the text drew a parallel between the situation of Iberia and the earth after Noah’s flood, until it reached the reign of Alfonso VI, the new dispeller of darkness. With him, the city of Toledo, the head of the whole kingdom of Hispania, was brought back to Christian worship and assumed its pre-eminent position over the rest of the cities in the kingdom and its leading role, as it had in ancient times.92 This narrative served to introduce the visit of bishop Raymond to Saint-Denis where, according to the story, while praying at the altar he saw a tombstone that read “beati Eugenii toletani archiepiscopi corpus” (notice the explicit mention of Eugene as archbishop). This was an authentic revelation that bound together, directly, the first bishop of Toledo, who supposedly spread the Christian faith in Spain under St. Denis’s command, and his successor in the twelfth century. The arrival of Eugene’s right arm to Toledo (following Raymond’s requests to Alfonso VII to plead for the relics to the French king, and the death of the bishop) also served to strengthen another parallelism between the royal city and the Davidean Jerusalem. If Alfonso II was a new King Solomon for Pelagius, he was a new David for the author of this translation. So, when the remains of St. Eugene arrived in Toledo, the monarch, together with his two sons and one of his nobles, carried the relic on their shoulders barefoot “as another David, [carrying] the Ark of the Lord […] to the royal city, as Jerusalem with the divine Ark of the Covenant.”93 Beside these parallels and symbolisms, the story of St. Eugene had neither the success nor the influence of the examples discussed earlier. Probably intended for “French Knights” (Caballeros franceses)94 (in fact, it is suggestive that what was translated was the arm of the saint, symbolic of command and guidance), it had minimal success, to the extent that it does not even appear in the great panegyric to Toledo, the De rebus Hispaniae, by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada. Clearly, he was an obscure saint who had few ties with local history nor had the value of a martyr from Roman times, such as St. Vincent, or from Muslim times, such as Nunilón and Alodia. Likewise, Eugene could not surpass figures of the importance of St. Isidore nor the impact of the vast collection of relics in the Arca santa at Oviedo. To make matters worse, the discovery of Eugene did not have any epic dimension but was a random event (the recognition of a tombstone in a church), very different from the fantastic dreams that surrounded most tales or the of Saint Eugene [...]” (tratará en los siglos XIII o XIV de edulcorar la leyenda del traslado del brazo de san Eugenio […]). Cited from Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad, 144.

92  “The city of Toledo, which had been head of all Hispania, was completely restored in the Christian faith, in such a way that it stand out now in both aspects of its glorious power, enjoying a preeminent name in the kingdom and an excellent primacy, as it was in the past” (Ciuitas Toleti, que tocius Yspanie caput erat […] christiane fidei ex integro restitutur, adeo ut, […] predicta ciuitas in utriusque potestatis gloria ceteris premineret, regii nominis prerogatiuam et primatus excellenciam, uelut antiquitus possideret). Cited from Rivera, Los textos hagio­gráficos, 64.

93  “Quasi alter Dauid portat archam Domini […] ad regiam civitate, quasi sanctam Iherusalem cum archa diuini phederis properabat.” Cited from Rivera, Los textos hagiográficos, 34. 94  Pérez-Embid, Hagio­logía y sociedad, 147.

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historical adventures of the Arca santa. In short, Toledo had to find hierarchical arguments in other fields (which they accomplished very successfully) and did not use relics in their legitimizing discourse. In summary, the use of relics was (as many scholars have stated before) an effective strategy to construct an ecclesiastical ideo­logy during the Middle Ages. Our analysis has shown how that construction was inescapably blended with the past; the past supports the narrative and, at the same time, provides a frame of veracity for the remains that were exhibited for worship. A relic was much more credible if its itinerary could be traced from a recognisable past than if it was presented as the result of an inventio; the further back a relic went, the more worthy of veneration the object became. Therefore, there was a compelling reason to delve into real or imaginary memory to demonstrate that the bones or objects were authentic, which in turn endowed the sanctuary that exhibited them with a dose of antiquity. Finally, the journey from past to present needed to be recorded in some way, both legitimating the tradition and the historicity of the remembrance. This was clearly understood by the anonymous author of another Hispanic passio dating from the late eighth century, that of St. Zoilo, when he said it is necessary to keep a record of the act of the saints for future times: So that facts are put down, lest what has been told from memory or fanciful notions, do not become covered in a cloak of forgetfulness, as the world ages, lest the faith of those hearing or telling them is seen as fantasy.95

95  “Quia succedentibus sibi per incertum uite tempus plebs etates tradere inuicem memorie mutue tantummodo quam mandare litteris maluerunt, ideo nunc necesse est eadem fidelibus scripta in tempora post futura transmitti, ne ea, que adhuc recordatione uel opinione rerum ut sunt gesta referuntur, palleo silentii optecta, mundo ueterescente, accipientium uel tradentium fides fabulosa uerba credatur.” Cited from Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, 2:379.

Chapter 6

ESTABLISHING A MEMORY IN MEDI­EVAL SPAIN ADELINE RUCQUOI

According to Cicero, in the second book of the De inventione:

Prudence is the knowledge of things which are good, or bad, or neither good nor bad. Its parts are memory, intelligence, and foresight. Memory is that faculty by which the mind recovers the knowledge of things which have been. Intelligence is that by which it perceives what exists at present. Foresight is that by which anything is seen to be about to happen, before it does happen.1

Memory is thus inherent to prudence, an essential virtue for people in the Middle Ages. Accordingly, in the pro­logue to his Estoria de España, Alfonso X of Castile wrote: The ancient sages […] understanding by the facts of God, which are spiritual, that the knowledge would be lost by dying those who knew it and without leaving remembrance, so that they would not fall into oblivion showed the way for those who had to come after them to know it.

And adds:

As, if it were not for the scriptures, what kind of human mind or wit could remember all things from the past, even if they did not find them again which is more grievous?2

The words “remembrance” (remembrança), “oblivion” (olvido), “recall” (menbrar) are inseparable from the work of Alfonso X, the Wise King, an example of wisdom and prudence. Past events must be remembered, and for that history must be written. This concern of the Wise King had been shared, two centuries earlier, by the Toledan Saí�d al 1  “Prudentia est rerum bonarum et malarum neutrarumque scientia. Partes eius: memoria, intellegentia, providentia. Memoria est, per quam animus repetit illa, quae fuerunt; intel­legentia, per quam ea perspicit, quae sunt; providentia, per quam futurum aliquid videtur ante quam factum est.” Cited from Cicero, De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cam­ bridge, 1949), 326 (book 2, chap. 160).

2  “Los sabios antiguos […] entendiendo por los fechos de Dios, que son espiritales, que los saberes se perderien muriendo aquellos que los sabien et no dexando remembrança, porque no cayessen en olvido mostraron manera por que los sopiessen los que avien de venir empos ellos” and “Ca si por las escripturas non fuesse, ¿qual sabidurí�a o engenno de omne se podrie menbrar de todas las cosas passadas, aun que no las fallassen de nuevo que es cosa mas grieue?” Cited from Alfonso X, Primera crónica general de España, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Diego Catalán, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1977), 1:3. Adeline Rucquoi ([email protected]) is Directeur de recherche émérite in Medi­eval History at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris, France.

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Andalusí� when, in his work on Las categorías de las naciones, he defined the sciences that distinguished the cultivated nations, not from the uncultivated ones, but from each other. Language, history, and religious law were the foundations of what might be called a “national identity” and perhaps, although anachronistically, a culture.3 Memory is undoubtedly a feature that characterizes human life and is inseparable from civilization. The primary meaning of “memoria” is a “Facultad psí�quica (or “Potencia del alma” in the 1970 edition) por medio de la cual se retiene y recuerda el pasado,” according to the Diccionario de la Lengua Española of the Real Academia Española.4 This definition partly subscribes to Henri Bergson’s 1896 conclusions about memory as something profoundly spiritual, as opposed to materialistic theories of memory that saw it as mere brain activity. For Bergson, memory is divided into memory–custom, which allows automatisms, and memory–remembering, which represents the past by recognizing it as the past; in the distinction he establishes between the soul and the body, the soul is the place of the past, the body that of the present.5 A century later, as the “commemorations” of historical events multiply, Paul Ricoeur dedicated various chapters of his La mémoire. L’histoire. L’oubli to personal and collective memory, to memory manipulated when mobilized in favour of a search for identity, and to what he calls obligatory memory, what leads to the “duty of memory,” the prohibition of forgetting. Faced with the idea of justice, says the philosopher, the duty of memory is not restricted to preserving the material imprint, written or not, of past events, but maintains the feeling of an obligation to those of our ancestors for the heritage they left us, not without “soumettre l’héritage à inventaire.”6 Such are the contemporary definitions of memory. Before dealing with this subject further, the historian must therefore think about their validity in the period and societies concerned.

Memory, Culture

Memory, its definition and its role, is a central theme of medi­eval thought. The readers of Cicero’s De inventione, then known as the Rhetorica vetus, knew that memory constituted one of the five parts of rhetoric, the others being invention, arrangement, 3  Saí�d al Andalusí�, Historia de la filosofía y de las ciencias o Libro de las categorías de las naciones, ed. Eloí�sa Llavero and Andrés Martí�nez Lorca (Madrid, 2000); Gabriel Martí�nez-Gros, “Classifications des nations et classifications des sciences: trois exemples andalous du V/XIe siècle,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 20 (1984): 83–114. 4  “Memoria,” accessed March 26, 2020 at https://dle.rae.es/memoria.

5  Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Paris, 1939).

6  Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire. L’histoire. L’oubli (Paris, 2000), 82–11, esp. 108: “C’est le rapport du devoir de mémoire à l’idée de justice qu’il faut interroger […] Nous sommes redevables à ceux qui nous ont précédé d’une part de ce que nous sommes. Le devoir de mémoire ne se borne pas à garder la trace matérielle, scripturaire ou autre, des faits révolus, mais entretient le sentiment d’être obligés à l’égard de ces autres dont nous dirons plus loin qu’ils ne sont plus mais qu’ils ont été. Payer la dette, dirons-nous, mais aussi soumettre l’héritage à inventaire.”



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elocution, and pronunciation.7 These same readers learnt that, with intelligence and foresight, memory was the integrating part of the virtue of “prudence,”8 and also of the close relationship between memory and history, history being the reminiscence of things “removed from the memory of our time.”9 Those who studied Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia10 read that “memory is of the past” (memoria autem praeteritorum est) and “it implies time” (memoria omnis cum tempore coniuncta est); the senses belong to the present and the evocation of the impression then received is memory. Moreover, with the Stagirite, they established the distinction between mere evocation, passive, of the past or mneme, and active recall, the search for the past as opposed to oblivion, or anamnesis.11 Finally, from the treatise Ad Herennium, attributed to Cicero under the name of Rethorica nova, they extracted the idea of a double memory, “natural” memory—“that which is imbedded in our minds, born simultaneously with thought” (ea, quae nostris animis insita est et simul cum cogitatione nata)—and “artificial” memory—“that which is strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline” (ea, quam confirmat inductio quaedam et ratio praeceptionis). While the former came naturally to man, the latter required places and images to exist—“The artificial memory includes backgrounds and images” (Constat igitur artificiosa memoria locis et imaginibus). “Memory 7  “And so that, indeed, appears to us to be the proper materials of rhetoric, which we have said appeared to be such to Aristotle; these are the divisions of it, as numerous writers have laid them down: Invention; Arrangement; Elocution; Memory; Delivery. Invention, is the conceiving of topics either true or probable, which may make one’s cause appear probable […] Memory, is the lasting sense in the mind of the matters and words corresponding to the reception of these topics (Quare materia quidem nobis rhetoricae videtur artis ea, quam Aristoteli visam esse diximus; partes autem eae, quas plerique dixerunt, inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio. Inventio est excogitatio rerum verarum aut veri similium, quae causam probabilem reddant; […] memoria est firma animi rerum ac verborum ad inventionem perceptio). Cicero, De inventione, trans. Hubbell, 20–21 (book 1, chap. 9). This same definition was taken up by Isidore of Seville in his Etimo­logías, 2, 3, 1. About rhetorica vetus and the nova, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance (Oakland, 1974), 109. 8  Cicero, De inventione, trans. Hubbell, 326 (book 2, chap. 160).

9  “Narration is an explanation of acts that have been done, or of acts as if they have been done […] That which is concerned in the discussion and explanation of things has three parts, fable, history, and argument. […] History is an account of exploits which have been performed, removed from the recollection of our own age; of which sort is the statement, Appius declared war against the Carthaginians” (Narratio est rerum gestarum aut ut gestarum expositio. […] Ea, quae in negotiorum expositione posita est, tres habet partes: fabulam, historiam, argumentum. […] Historia est gesta res, ab aetatis nostrae memoria remota; quod genus: Appius indixit Carthaginiensibus bellum). Cited from Cicero, De inventione, trans. Hubbell, 54 (book 1, chap. 27).

10  Known through the Epitome by Averroes, translated around 1225–1230 by Michael Scot. See Carla Di Martino, “La perception spirituelle. Perspectives de recherche pour l’histoire des Parva Naturalia dans la tradition arabo-latine,” Veritas 52 (2007) : 21–35; Michèle Goyens, Pieter de Leemans, and An Smets, Science Translated: Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medi­eval Europe (Leuven, 2008), 38–40.

11  Aristotelis libelli qui Parva Naturalia vulgo appellantur (Paris, 1554), 30–31. Ricoeur, La mémoire, 18–25.

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is a wonderful gift of nature” (Memoria est gloriosum et admirabile nature donum), as Boncompagno da Signa wrote in 1235 in his Rhetorica novissima, before adding that artificial memory is the suffragix et coadiutrix of the natural memory.12 We have here the sources from which Henri Bergson drew his inspiration. Despite knowing the definitions given by Aristotle in the Parva Naturalia and those in the rhetorical treatise Ad Herennium, which distinguished between natural and artificial memory without granting them a moral qualification, the great thinkers of the entire Middle Ages closely linked memory to the virtus of prudence.13 Memory, and its written and logical expression, which is history—rei praeteritae ratio—had as its raison d’être the attainment of moral ends and the order of the world. In fact, to justify his work, Alfonso X of Castile wrote: So that those who would come after, by the deeds of the good, might strive to do good, and by the deeds of the wicked to avoid doing evil, and for this reason the course of the world was made straight, putting everything in its place.14

The pro­logue of the Estoria de España as well as that of the General Estoria enable us to see that their writers fully shared the more “modern” concepts of their time regarding memory. Similarly, around 1277, when redacting his Dictaminis Epithalamium, Juan Gil de Zamora was inspired by the works of the Italians Guido Faba and Boncompagno da Signa, who granted to memory the power to evoke both paradise and hell: “We, who undoubtedly believe the Catholic faith, must assiduously remember the invisible joys of paradise and the eternal torments of hell.”15 A contemporary of Boncompagno da Signa, Albertus Magnus, began his study of memory as part of his discussion of prudentia by refuting various objections from other philosophers: the first was that memory would be found in the sensitive part of the soul 12  Cicero, Rethoricorum ad Herennium libri quattuor, ed. Fridericus Lindemannus (Leipzig, 1828), 217–219 (book 3, chap. 16). “Memory is an admirable and glorious gift of nature, by which the past is remembered, the present is conceived and the future is contemplated thanks to the similarity with the past. […] Natural memory is that which comes from the sole favor of nature, without any artifice. […] Artificial memory is the support and the aid of natural memory, because it is like the slave of the lady. And it is called natural by art, because it is artificially invented by the subtlety of wit” (Memoria est gloriosum et admirabile nature donum, qua preterita recolimus, presentia complectimur et futura per preterita similitudinarie contemplamur […] Memoria naturalis est, que a solo beneficio nature procedit, nullo artificio preeunte […] Artificialis memoria est suffragix et coadiutrix memorie naturalis, quia sibi tamquam domine famulatur. Et dicitur naturalis ab arte, quia per subtilitatem ingenii artificialiter est inventa). Cited from Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica Novissima, book 8, accessed June 13, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20061205140439/ http://dobc.unipv.it/scrineum/wight/rn8.htm#8.1.1. 13  Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 2010), 63–92.

14  “Por que los que despues viniessen, por los fechos de los buenos punnassen en fazer bien, et por los de los malos que se castigassen de fazer mal, et por esto fue endereçado el curso del mundo de cada una cosa en su orden.” Cited from Alfonso X, Primera crónica general, 1:3.

15  “Nos autem, qui fidem catholicam indubitanter credimus, invisibilium gaudiorum Paradisi et eternarum penarum Inferni debemus assidue memorari.” Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica Novissima, 8.1.16, cited by Yates, The Art of Memory, 71; Juan Gil de Zamora, Dictaminis Epi­ thalamium, ed. Charles Faulhaber (Pisa, 1978), 16.



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while prudence would be located in the rational part; the second contrasted prudence, as a moral habit, to memory as a repository to recall impressions and events from the past.16 The “sensitive part of the soul” in Albertus Magnus’s thought, the “feeling of an obligation” in Paul Ricoeur’s words: memory could therefore be distinguished from history, magistra vitae according to Cicero’s formula, which is the relation (narratio) of the past by those who saw it, according to Isidore of Seville in his Etymo­logies (I, 41, 1). The glossary compiled in San Millán de la Cogolla in 964 added a rational component to these definitions, a logic in the presentation of the facts, by defining history as rei preterite ratio.17 In a lecture he gave in 2002, Laurent Wirth stated,“Inscribed in the present, this memory is the heritage of living groups. In fact, as the socio­logist Halbwachs said in the 1930s, there are as many memories as there are groups. It is therefore, by its very nature, plural.” He added that “history is first and foremost a process of truth. Herodotus, the father of history, gave the word history this dimension of the process of truth as early as the fifth century BC.”18 The apparent contradiction between memory and history, between the “sensitive part of the soul” and its rational part, belonged to philosophical debate. In everyday life, memory was conceived of as an evocation of the past with moral perspectives, both rational knowledge and ethics. “Memory” implies the existence of a present—the “public” this evocation is aimed at—and a future: behave well, earn a place in paradise by choosing good examples and rejecting bad ones. Alfonso X stated this clearly. History was an anamnesis, a struggle against oblivion. As such, it was consubstantial to man and, therefore, inseparable from culture. But what is culture? In anthropo­logy, the term designates the set of beliefs, knowledge, rites, and behaviour of a society, although some prefer to distinguish between culture—immaterial assets—and civilization—material assets. The French writer and politician Edouard Herriot (1872–1957) defined it ironically as “what remains when everything has been forgotten,” in other words the moral and personal formation acquired through the accumulation of knowledge.19 However, the Middle Ages did not use the word “culture.” At the end of the fifteenth century, in his Universal vocabulario en latín y romance, published in 1490, Alfonso of Palencia still defined the word thus: “it is 16  Yates, The Art of Memory, 74.

17  Claudio Garcí�a Turza and Javier Garcí�a Turza, El códice emilianense 46 de la Real Academia de la Historia, primer diccionario enciclopédico de la Península ibérica (Logroño, 1997), 369.

18  “Inscrite dans le présent, cette mémoire est le patrimoine de groupes vivants. De ce fait, comme l’a dit, dès les années trente, le socio­logue Halbwachs qui est mort en déportation à Buchen­wald, il y a autant de mémoires que de groupes. Elle est donc par nature plurielle. […] Ces mémoires éclatées, sélectives, souvent contraires, ne sont pas, on le voit bien, synonyme d’histoire. En effet, l’histoire est avant tout une procédure de vérité. En choisissant d’intituler son œuvre historie, c’est à dire enquête en grec, Hérodote, le père de l’histoire, donne dès le 5e siècle avant J.-C. au mot histoire cette dimension de procédure de vérité.” Cited from Laurent Wirth, “Histoire et mémoire,” Le Bulletin de Liaison des Professeurs d’Histoire-Géo­graphie de l’académie de Reims 26 (2002): unpag., but available online at www.cndp.fr/crdp-reims/ressources/brochures/blphg/bul26/ wirth.htm, accessed December 6, 2019. 19  Edouard Herriot, Notes et maximes (Paris, 1961).

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called from incolendo and cultivators are those who grow the fruits, and cult [worship] is religion in praise of God.”20 More than a century later, in 1611, in the entry cultivar in the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Sebastián de Covarrubias would explain that: “Strictly speaking, it means to cultivate the land so that it gives fruit, from colendo. Cultivated, culture, agriculture. To cultivate ingeniousness, to exercise it, from the verb colo, colis.”21 Indeed both authors also agree in linking “cult” with “the verb colo which means polish and decorate” (el verbo colo que sinifica pulir y adornar), according to the Tesoro. Memory will then serve as a “decoration” (adorno) to everyday life, as “culture’. Among modern histories of Spain, José Antonio Maravall’s 1954 work El concepto de España en la Edad Media attempted to “Hacer explí�cita ante la conciencia de hoy la urdimbre de ideas, creencias, sentimientos, aspiraciones, etc., con que se ha tejido nuestra Historia.”22 Analyzing external and internal sources, Maravall demonstrated that there was a communal concept founded in the terms Hispania, Hispanus, Hispani, a Hispanic “culture.” However, if memory is distinguished from history by its sentimental, sometimes irrational, dimension, perhaps we need to seek it outside elaborated, explicative, rational histories, whether these are of kingdoms or attempts at a universal history that place the history of a specific region—such as Spain or Castile—within a divine plan initiated by the creation of the world. We will therefore turn now and focus on a series of texts praising Spain, the contents of which can serve as a guide when searching for the principal elements that set up this Hispanic “memory,” simultaneously historical, affective, and sentimental. From the praise of Spain by Isidore of Seville at the beginning of the seventh century to the Discurso sobre la precedencia del rey de Castilla sobre el de Inglaterra given by Alfonso of Cartagena in Basel in 1434, the texts we examine choose places and images until they form a collective “memory,” specific to the inhabitants of the Peninsula.

De laude Spaniae

The founding text in this memory is the De laude Spaniae by Isidore of Seville, which begins with the history of the origin of the Goths and that of the Vandals and the Suebi, and ends with chapters of praise for the Goths. Isidore, metropolitan of Hispalis, finished his work in the third decade of the seventh century and evokes Spain with feminine images of fertility and power: it is a sacred mother and always happy, it is queen and honour. Its first characteristic is its natural setting: temperate zone, rivers, hills, fields, seas, which results in the fertility of its soil—“with righteousness Nature enriched 20  “Se dize de incolendo e son cultores los que cultivan los fruttos; e culto es religion en loor de dios.” Cited from Alfonso de Palencia, Universal vocabulario en latín y romance (Seville, 1490), fol. 100v.

21  “Propiamente es labrar la tierra para que dé fruto, a colendo. Cultivado, cultura, agricultura. Cultivar el ingenio, exercitarle, a verbo colo, colis.” Cited from Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid, 1611), fol. 259r. 22  José Antonio Maravall, El concepto de España en la Edad Media (Madrid, 1981), 7.



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you and was more indulgent with you through the abundance of all created things” (Merito te omnium ubertate gignentium indulgentior natura ditavit)—an abundance of fruit, vines, olives, wheat, mines, horses, and cattle. Then come its inhabitants, men of talent born to rule—“You are, moreover, rich in children, in precious stones, and in purple and, at the same time, most fertile in talents and rulers of empires, and so you are as opulent to enhance princes as you are happy to give birth to them” (Alumnis igitur et gemmis dives et purpuris rectoribusque pariter et dotibus imperiorum fertilis sic opulenta es principibus ornandis ut beata pariendis). Desired by Rome that managed to marry it/her—“This is why, rightly, the golden Rome, head of the people, longed for you and, although the Roman power, first victorious, has possessed you” (Iure itaque te iam pridem aurea Roma caput gentium concupivit, et licet te sibimet eadem Romulea virtus primum victrix desponderit)—, this Spain/woman was eventually taken and loved by the victorious Goths.23 Natural conditions and a history in which only Rome and its victors, the Goths, appear as “lovers” thus confirm the excellence of “mother” Spain, the object of desire for both. Apart from the generic evocation of the victorious campaigns by the Goths against “all the peoples of Europe” and finally Rome,24 no specific event is mentioned. The “memory” of Spain is that of a place, the Peninsula, and an image, that of a beautiful woman desired by the greatest, first Rome and then the Goths. In the mid-eighth century, after the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors, two chronicles, the so-called Chronica Byzantia-arabica and the Chronica muzarabica, added a third actor to the pair made up of Rome and the Goths, namely the “Saracens” or “Arabs.” With the disappearance of the Goths from history, they were replaced by mention of Spain (Spania) “so rich in goods of all kinds,”and “so splendidly provided after innumerable sufferings that one could say that it was like a grenade in August,” writes the author of the Muzarabica, about the arrival of governor Abdelmelic in the year 734.25 A century and a half later, in 883, the Crónica Albeldense is inspired by these elements. It describes Spain using the Etymo­logies by St. Isidore, adds to this brief description the six ecclesiastical provinces: Cartagena (Toledo), Seville, Lusitania, Galicia, Tarragona, Tingitania, and Narbonne, the four rivers of Spain, the “famous things of Spain,” and, referring to the specific qualities of the peoples, emphasizes “the strength of the Goths” (fortia gotorum). After a brief review of the ages of the world since Adam, it focuses on Roman history—kings and emperors starting with Julius Caesar—and the story of the Goths. And because the Goths had sinned, the Ishmaelites entered into Spain.26 For the author of the Albeldense, Spain remained above all an admirable land, object of greed for 23  Cristóbal Rodrí�guez Alonso, Las historias de los godos, vándalos y suevos de Isidoro de Sevilla (Leon, 1975), 168–71. 24  Rodrí�guez Alonso, Las historias de los godos, 282–89.

25  “Omnibus bonis opimam et ita floride post tantos dolores repletam, ut diceres augustalem esse malogranatam.” Cited from Iohannes Gil, ed., Corpus scriptorum muzarabicorum, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1973), 1:7–54, esp. 43. 26  Juan Gil Fernández, José L. Moralejo, and Juan Ignacio Ruiz de la Peña, Crónicas asturianas (Oviedo, 1985), 153–88.

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the Romans and Goths, lost by them for their sins, and won by the Muslims, although not forever. In Cordoba in the first half of the tenth century, Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Razi (d. 955) wrote a History of the Kings of Al-Andalus (Ajbār mulūk Al-Andalus), which was completed by his son Isa ibn Ahmad al-Razi after 977, and which we know of partly under the name of the Crónica del Moro Rasis. Spain, with the various peoples who settled there before the coming of the Moors, was the protagonist of the story, which begins with a description of the Peninsula, “very good land and very well stocked with all fruits and many springs, and with far fewer poisonous animals than there are in other lands.” Cities, with Cordoba in first place for being the “mother of all the cities of Spain,” head the description with a mixture of topo­graphical, historical, and legendary data.27 Around the same time, about 953–961, also in Cordoba, the Jew Hasday ibn Shaprut, the caliph’s physician and naši of his community, sent a letter to the king of the Khazars in which he points out where Spain lies, and describes it as “a fertile land, full of rivers, springs, and drilled wells, a land of wheat, wine, and oil, of many and delicious fruits and all kinds of precious things.” This land, he states, has gardens and orchards, hills where saffron and cochineal are harvested, mines of silver, gold, copper, iron, tin, zinc, sulphur, marble, and crystal. To these natural, almost paradisiacal, conditions, Ibn Shaprut adds an element that appears under no other pen, that in this country, whose name “is Sepharad in the holy language, while in the language of the Arabs who reside in the country it is Al-Andalus,” goods are found from all over the world.28 If memory, as the Ad Herennium indicates, needs places and images to exist, the memory of al-Andalus was effectively at the same time both a place and an image, that of a paradise. In the early twelfth century, the anonymous author of the Historia called Silense, dealt with the memory of Spain from another angle. “In the past” (olim), he writes, “the liberal arts flourished throughout Spain, and those who longed for wisdom devoted themselves everywhere to the study of letters.” This Spain characterized by knowledge was “flooded” by waves of barbarians, either Arians like the Emperor Constantine—“towards the end of his life, seduced by a simulator of the catholic faith called Eusebius, bishop of the church of Nicomeda, and rebaptized, he fell miserably into Arian heresy”—, the Gothic king Liuvigild, catholic but fierce and avaricious like the Franks—Charlemagne is corrupted by gold according to the custom of the Franks (more francorum auro corruptus)—, or the Moors who “brought under their dominion all of Spain blackened by iron, 27  “Muy buena tierra e muy abondada de todas frutas e muchas fuentes, e muy menguada de muchas animalias poçonientas que ha en las otras tierras” and “madre de todas las çibdades de España.” Cited from Diego Catalán and Marí�a Soledad de Andrés, Crónica de 1344 (Madrid, 1970), 31–84; Diego Catalán and Marí�a Soledad de Andrés, Crónica del Moro Rasis. Versión del Ajbar Muluk al-Andalus de Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Musa al-Razi, 889–955; romanzada para el rey don Dionís de Portugal hacia 1300 por Mahomad, alarife, y Gil Pérez, clérigo de don Perianes Porçel (Madrid, 1975). 28  “Una tierra fértil, llena de rí�os, fuentes y pozos horadados, tierra de trigo, vino y aceite, múltiples y deliciosos frutos y de todo género de cosas preciosas” and “es Sefarad en la lengua santa, mientras que en la lengua de los árabes que residen en el paí�s es Al-Andalus.” Cited from Carlos del Valle Rodrí�guez, La escuela hebrea de Córdoba (Madrid, 1981), 319–46.



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fire and famine.”29 The “memory” of Spain transmitted by the author of the Silense, who was probably a monk in San Juan Bautista in Leon, does not include its landscapes and natural riches, but focuses rather on the wisdom of its inhabitants, mercilessly attacked by the “barbarians,” who were enemies of knowledge and the true faith. Faced with the policy of Pope Gregory VII, who implied that Hispanic liturgy was not orthodox,30 and at a time of debate on the relationship between faith and reason, he presents Spain as the land of faith and knowledge, “invaded” and not “espoused” by enemy peoples. Knowledge was also the main theme of the Sefer ha-Qabbalah, or Book of Tradition, by the Toledan philosopher Abraham ibn Daud, who relates the history of the Jews, from the origins of the world until 1160, as an uninterrupted translatio of knowledge, from sage to sage, from school to school, from the time of the prophets.31 This continuous tradition began in biblical times and concluded with the destruction of the First Temple and the end of the Persian Empire, a moment that coincided with the arrival of the Jews in Spain. These times give way to the period of the Second Temple in the time of Alexander the Great until its disappearance after the campaigns of Titus. Then come the generations of the Tannaim, followed by the Amoraim in Babylon, the Savoraim—with the onset of Islam—the Geonim, and finally the rabbinate. The succession of empires, Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, and Christian, was parallel to the transmission of knowledge that reached its culmination in Spain at the time of ‘Abd al-Rahman III. The author of the so-called Chronica Naierensis, an anonymous Clunaic monk in 1180, relied on the Historiae by Isidore of Seville and so returned to a more traditional history in which, after evoking the creation of the world and the biblical generations, the remembered past comprised the parallel history of the Romans and the Goths down to the arrival of Tariq at the head of the mauri.32 Perhaps influenced by the Historia Scholastica by Petrus Comestor, the author of the Naierensis included a brief mention of the succession of the empires and of Alexander the Great.33 Places and images: down the centuries, in the memory of Castile, Spain remained a paradisiacal place whose existence dated back to the beginning of the world, a temperate land where pleasant vegetation, knowledge, virtue, and arts flourished, coveted and invaded by the “barbarian” Romans, Goths, Moors, and Franks. However, in the northeastern part of the Peninsula, the memory evoked in the writings, solely Christian, began

29  “Cum olim Yspania omni liberali doctrina ubertim floreret, ac in ea studio literarum fontem sapientiae sitientes passim operam darent […] circa finem vite a quodam catholice fidei simulatore nomine Eusebio Nicomediensis ecclesie episcopo seductus et rebaptizatus, in arrianam heresim misere corruit […] Post hec mauri, viribus nullis obstantibus, totam Yspaniam ferro, flama et fame atritam suo dominio mancipaverunt.” Cited from Justo Pérez de Urbel and Atilano González RuizZorrilla, eds., Historia Silense (Madrid, 1959), 113–17 and 127–31. 30  José Marí�a Soto, “Introducción del rito romano en los reinos de España. Argumentos del papa Gregorio VII,” Studi Gregoriani 14 (1992): 161–74.

31  Abraham ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah. The Book of Tradition, ed. Gerson D. Cohen (London, 1969).

32  Juan E. Estévez Sola, ed., Chronica Naierensis (Turnhout, 1995).

33  Estévez Sola, Chronica Naierensis, 26–27; Amaia Arizaleta, “La Historia scholastica en la Chronica naiarensis. Genealogí�a alejandrina de la traición sororal,” e-Spania 7 (2009), accessed June 28, 2011, http://e-spania.revues.org/18033.

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later, with the evangelization of the world by the apostles after Pentecost, continued with the destructions due to the “pagans,” and focused on the slow rebuilding of places “deserted” for a long time.34 It is an eschato­logical memory, not a historical one. The Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, written in the second half of the twelfth century, often presented as the “memory” of Catalonia, was no more a general history, being rather the history of a family, that of the counts of Barcelona, intimately linked to the Monastery of Ripoll, at a time when the title of count tended to leave the primacy to the royal title of Aragon. So, for centuries, Castile was the only kingdom in the Peninsula that wrote the history of Spain, in the way the French did for themselves.35

O beata Hispania

If the seventh century had seen the brilliance of Hispania in the midst of a “barbaric” West, the thirteenth century was the apogee of the Hispanic kingdoms within Europe. Alfonso X the Wise and James the Conqueror prevailed, one for his wisdom, the other for his military skills against the enemies of the Christian faith, deserving of the nickname of stupor mundi.36 The Spaniards, who could feel proud of pursuing their crusade, lived this moment to the full and wanted to leave a record of the great deeds of their ancestors. The first author who stands out was a jurist, Vincentius Hispanus, who studied and then taught canon law at Bo­logna in the early thirteenth century. Considered one of the leading jurists of his time, Vincentius was one of the two glossators of the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.37 The love Vicentius felt for his motherland led him to call it noble, even most noble (“it is the overcoat, which covers the shirts of the most noble Spain” [id est supertunicalia, ut celentur tunice nobilissime Hyspanie]), and holy (“holy lady Spain” [beate domine Yspane]). Its inhabitants, he claimed, were noble (“and the noble Spaniards call it legua” [et apud nobiles hyspanos dicitur leuca]); men of honour (“with deeds, like a Spaniard, not with words like a Frenchman” [facto, ut yspanus, non autem verbis, ut francigena]); unlike the Lombards, they are hospitable, and Spain enjoys a special grace (”the grace of the Spaniards we call special” [Gratia yspanorum dicamus speciale]). Vincentius asserted the superiority of Spain over the other nations (Hispania est maior aliis provinciis), particularly the Holy Roman Empire and France. This superiority was due not only to its riches and virtues (”wealthy in horses, celebrated for food, and shining with gold; steadfast and wise, the envy of all; skilled 34  Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne, IXe-XIIe siècle (Madrid, 2003), 985–95.

35  Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985).

36  Robert I. Burns, ed., The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror. Intellect and Force in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1985); Robert I. Burns, ed., Emperor of Culture. Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance (Philadelphia, 1990). 37  Javier Ochoa, Vincentius Hispanus, canonista boloñés del siglo XIII (Rome, 1960); Antonio Garcí�a, ed., Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis una cum Commentariis glossatorum (Vatican City, 1981), 271–384: Vincentii Hispani apparatus; Gaines Post, “Vincentius Hispanus, ‘Pro ratione voluntas’, and Medi­eval and Early Modern Theories of Sovereignty,” Traditio 28 (1972): 159–84.



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in the laws and standing high on sublime pillars” [dives equis, preclara cibis auroque refulgens; parca fuge, prudens et cunctis invidiosa; iura sciens et stans sublimibus alta columpnis]), but also to the fact that it had its own laws, had obtained by itself the imperium, and elected its own bishops. In contrast to the kingdom of France whose twelve pairs were killed by the Hispanics, and to the German emperor who held his power from the Pope, the only true emperor was that of Spain because he had his power from no one but God alone (”you can say that the Hispanic emperor is the true emperor, who holds the sword from no one but from God” [dicere potestis imperatorem yspanum esse verum imperatorem, qui a nullo nisi a Deo habet gladium]).38 This legal and political independence, which enabled Vincentius Hispanus to exalt his homeland over all others, was effectively recognized by the other great canonist of his time, Johannes Teutonicus, who explained in his commentary on the decretal Venerabilem that “with the exception of Spain, the government of the world was transferred to the Germans” (Sic enim regnum mundi excepto regimine hispanie translatum est ad teutonicos).39 A contemporary of Vincentius Hispanus, Diego Garcí�a de Campos (ca. 1150–ca. 1220), chancellor to King Alfonso VIII of Castile, studied theo­logy in Paris and attended the Fourth Lateran Council with archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada.40 In the pro­logue addressed to the Toledan prelate, Diego Garcí�a shows his knowledge of the European peoples, their customs, moral, physical, and intellectual characteristics, and flaunted his love for Spain, a love not without criticism: “Spain, faithful indeed and fertile, extended and magnificent, happy above all, if it were not so insatiably bellicose, as if it were, as before, dedicated to Mars or Palladium” (Fidelis enim et fertilis, larga et dapsilis, et super omnes felix hyspania, si non esset tam insaciabiliter bellicosa, tamquam fuisset olim marti vel palladi dedicata). The internal wars, the division of languages, and the bad rulers pluck from him the lamentation of Jeremiah: “O pain, Spain, devastated by its internal struggles so often and inconsolably; and sometimes occupied by ignorant and foreign men, as we read” (Proh dolor, Hispania, suis intestinis preliis sepe sepuis inconsolabiter devastata: ab ignotis et advenis non numquam legitur occupata).41 A few years after Vincentius Hispanus commented on Lateran IV, Canon Lucas, from the monastery of San Isidoro in Leon, undertook for Queen Berenguela of Castile the writing of a Chronicon mundi. After a series of moral recommendations addressed to kings and princes, the future bishop of Tuy directed his praises to Spain, recounting its “excellences” or “blessings.” Relying on Isidore of Seville, he began with the benefits of its geo­graphy—air, rivers, hills, fertility of the land, birds of prey, horses—but dedicated most of his pro­logue to the illustrious men who ennobled their homeland: saints and doctors, headed by the apostle St. James, followed by the Roman emperors—Nerva, Trajan, Theodosius—, philosophers and writers like Aristotle, Seneca, and Lucan, and 38  Ochoa, Vincentius Hispanus, 14–18; Gaines Post, Studies in Medi­eval Legal Thought. Public Law and the State, 1100–1322 (Princeton, 1964), 482–93: Vincentius Hispanus and Spanish Nationalism. 39  Ochoa, Vincentius Hispanus, 68, n. 212.

40  Diego Garcí�a de Campos, Planeta, ed. Manuel Alonso (Madrid, 1943). 41  Garcí�a de Campos, Planeta, 180 (fol. 11v).

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concluded with an evocation of the virtues of the Spaniards. However, Lucas de Tuy did not restrict his praises to the fertility of the land and the list of memorable people, whether for their saintliness or their wisdom or skill as rulers. Like Vincentius Hispanus, he noted the “freedom” of Spain, freedom because it had its own law and because its king did not obey any temporal power: ”Spain also shines for its entire freedom, since it resorts for civil causes to its own right, and since the king of Spaniards is not subject to any temporal supreme power” (Prefulget etiam omnimoda libertate Yspania, cum in agendis causis civilibus propriis utitur legibus, et Yspanorum rex nulli subditur imperio temporali).42 Favourable natural conditions, the multiplication of individuals admirable for their faith and knowledge, and full autonomy were therefore the elements that, in the Chronicon mundi, characterized Spain and made it undoubtedly superior to the other nations, even if Lucas made no explicit comparisons. A contemporary of Lucas de Tuy, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, indicated at the beginning of the pro­logue to his De rebus Hispaniae liber, that he was writing to avoid losing memory of the invisible things done by God. In his work, which does not follow the pattern of biblical history to the extent that he takes the Goths as its guiding thread, the archbishop does not lavish special praise on Spain but turns it into the only protagonist in this history, as the few pages he dedicated to biblical history or antiquity were related to the Iberian Peninsula through Japheth’s son, Tubal, Hercules, and Hispan.43 Via Tubal, Noah’s grandson, Spain traced its antiquity back to the second beginning of the world (after the Biblical flood); Hercules and Hispan introduced it into history, a history prior to the fall of Troy, an event particularly valued at the time in Europe. On the other hand, following the tradition of a Spain in which knowledge flourished, he pointed out that, thanks to the Goths, the knowledge of Athens and the liberal arts was directly transferred to the Peninsula.44 Some decades later, in the 1270s, the Franciscan Juan Gil de Zamora was appointed preceptor to Prince Sancho, the future Sancho IV of Castile. To educate his pupil, he drew up a “mirror for princes” which he titled De preconiis Hispaniae liber, a compendium of what a future monarch should know, and remember, about his homeland. After a first chapter that evoked the historical antecedents of the country, in other words, Tubal, Hercules, and Hispan, Juan Gil explained, through various authors from Antiquity, the “fertility” of Spain, its cities and provinces in the time of the Goths, the variety of its products, and the qualities of its people. To summarize his praise he resorted, as Vincentius Hispanus had done before, to the verses of “that excellent versifier: Who will be able to enumerate your praisers, Spain? / For its wealth in horses, its fame for crops, the abundance of its mines / Their few defeats, their immense worth although lavish in gifts, 42  Lucae Tudensis, Chronicon Mundi, ed. Emma Falque (Turnhout, 2003), 5–10.

43  Roderici Ximenii de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie sive Historia gothica, ed. Juan Fernández Valverde (Turnhout, 1987), 9–19. For Hercules in the history of Spain, see Adeline Rucquoi, “Le héros avant le saint: Hercule en Espagne,” in Ab urbe condita... Fonder et refonder la ville: récits et représentations (Seconde moitié du Moyen Âge-premier XVIe siècle), ed. Véronique Lamazou-Duplan (Pau, 2011), 55–75. 44  Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 32.



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/ For their bravery in the matter of war, for their wisdom / the Spaniards are shining,” inspired in the Laus serenae reginae by Claudian.45 To illustrate the royal virtues of largesse, perseverance, courage, and prudence, he pointed out a series of illustrious characters from Viriatus to El Cid, passing through Trajan, Nerva, Hadrian, and Theodosius, five Gothic kings, Pelayo, and the first kings of Oviedo. Juan Gil de Zamora then insisted on the sanctity and integrity of the Spaniards by evoking numerous saints and prelates, and on their scholarship with the memory of Aristotle, Averroes, Avicenna, Seneca, John of Seville, Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, Paulus Orosius, Isidore of Seville, Lucan, and Martial. Before returning to the qualities expected of a prince, in his personal life and in his relations with his people, Prince Sancho’s tutor dedicated a chapter to the geo­graphy of Spain in which he mentions the cities and towns of Leon, Castile, Portugal, Aragon, Cartagena, Galicia and “Carpentania,” Navarre and Provence, with specific attention to Zamora. The “memory” of Spain under this Franciscan pen thus includes the antiquity of its history, the fertility of its soil, and the spirit of its inhabitants, whether emperors and kings, saints or sages. Within the encyclopaedic project of Alfonso X the Wise, the Estoria de España was then written. It is a text that mixes all previous knowledge, biblical history, Herculean mytho­logy, Roman history, history of the Goths, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, and the history of Mohammed. At the end of the first part of this history, at the moment of the “loss” of Spain to the Moors, a chapter appears titled “On the praise of Spain as it is abundant in all goods” (Del loor de España como es complida de todos los bienes). This eulogy begins with a praise to “the very noble people of the Goths” and continues explaining why “among all the lands that God treated best, the most notable is Spain in the West.” Because of the fertility of its land, its situation between the mountains of the north and the Ocean and Tyrrhenian Sea, its five rivers, great valleys and plains, riches in products of the land, the sea, and its minerals. “This Spain that we talk about,” write the authors of the Estoria de España, “is like paradise.” Moreover, “Spain, above all the others, is clever, bold, and strenuous in the fight, light in its eagerness, loyal to the Lord, strengthened in study, palatial in its word, and replete in all goods,” which led the king to exclaim, “Oh, Spain! there is no language or talent that can tell your fortune.”46 We find here a new declaration of love for Spain, just like the praises dedicated to the Peninsula by Claudian or Isidore of Seville. However, in the Estoria de España, the love the author expresses for Spain was shared by more than just the Romans or the Goths who desired it to the extent of wanting to possess it, since it claims that the first to profess this love of Spain was God. 45  Quidam egregius versificator: Quis posset numerare tuas Hispaniae laudes, / Dives equis, preclara cibis, pretiosa metallis / Parca fuge, prelarga manu, sed prodiga donis, / Armis militia rebus probitate, sophia / Hispani clarent. Cited from Juan Gil de Zamora, De preconiis Hispanie, ed. Manuel de Castro (Madrid, 1955), 22.

46  “La muy noble yente de los godos”; “entre todas las tierras que ell [Dios] onrro mas, España la de occidente fue”; “esta España que dezimos, tal es como el parayso”; “España sobre todas es engeñosa, atrevuda et mucho esforçada en lid, ligera en affan, leal al señor, affincada en estudio, palaciana en palabra, complida de todo bien”; “¡Ay, España! non a lengua nin engeño que pueda contar tu bien.” Cited from Alfonso X, Primera crónica general, 310–12.

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Drawing on a memory inherited from Isidore of Seville, which included, by Roman tradition, great descriptions of its natural benefits—the climate, the rivers, the fertility of the land, and the diversity of its products—and of the value of its inhabitants, the thirteenth century elaborated an image of Spain which included the past: through Tubal, Spain existed from the dawn of the world, and the worth of its inhabitants was evident in its saints, its sages, and its kings. Notable among the qualities of the Spaniards was their loyalty to the true faith, which established a direct bond with God, a God who had granted them a place, a land that was an image of paradise. The “naturals” of this land and their “natural lord,” the king, depended only on God and obeyed no earthly power.47 This independence from earthly powers, claimed by Vincentius Hispanus and Lucas of Tuy, was confirmed by the direct and exclusive bond that existed between God and Spain.

Most Noble Spain

In 1434 the embassy of the king of Castile reached the council convened in Basel three years earlier by Pope Martin V. John II’s ambassadors demanded to sit behind the French delegation, ahead of the English. To support this claim, the bishop of Burgos, Alfonso of Cartagena, presented the reasons why Castile should precede England: the nobility and antiquity of Spain, the courage and nobleness its inhabitants always displayed, the fact that they fought against the infidels in defence of Christianity, and the nobility of the lineage and person of its king.48 In the Castilian prelate’s discourse, very old themes arose, like the bounty of the country’s natural conditions or its antiquity since, in Spain, and even in that part of Spain called Castile, there were kings before the first destruction of Troy […] and thus, since the times of Geryon, king of Spain or, rather, king of Castile who reigned over that part that we now call Castile, to our days, two thousand six hundred and three years and more have gone by.

By contrast, the “royal seat on England” only dated from “one thousand one hundred years.”49 In the field of the “reception of faith” (recepción de la fee), namely, conversion to Christianity, Spain was also well ahead of England: the latter was only evangelized by Joseph of Arimathea while the former was delivered to the faith by the apostle St. James. The size of Castile, its temperate climate, the diversity of its peoples, and their languages 47  Adeline Rucquoi, “Tierra y gobierno en la Pení�nsula ibérica medi­eval,” in Las Indias occidentales: procesos de integración territorial (siglos xvi–xix), ed. Ó� scar Mazí�n and José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez (Mexico City, 2012), 43–67; Adeline Rucquoi, “Rei i regne. Conceptes polí�tics en el segle xiii,” in Jaume I i el seu temps. 800 anys després, ed. Rafael Narbona Vizcaí�no (Valencia, 2012), 407–24.

48  Alfonso de Cartagena, “Discurso sobre la precedencia del rey Católico sobre el de Inglaterra,” in Prosistas castellanos del siglo xv, ed. Mario Penna (Madrid, 1959), 205–33; Luis Suárez Fernández, Castilla, el Cisma y la crisis conciliar (1378–1440) (Madrid, 1960), 115–20.

49  “En España, e aun en aquella parte de España que se llama Castilla, ovo reyes antes de la primera destrucción de Troya […] E así�, de Gerión, rey de España, o más propiamente fablando rey de Castilla, que en aquella parte regnava que agora llamamos Castilla, fasta el dia de oy, son pasados dos mill seiscientos e tres años e aún más; silla real de Inglaterra; mill e cient años.” Cited from Cartagena, “Discurso sobre la precedencia,” 212–13.



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or, in the words of Alfonso of Cartagena, “the greatness of the kingdom,” “the abundance of the land,” “the number of its peoples,” and “the abundance of riches,” also manifested the superiority of the Iberian Peninsula over the British Isles.50 However, the discourse of September 14, 1434, introduced new elements into this idealized image of the motherland. Through an inversion of terms, Castile was no longer part of Spain and its king—metonymically—called “king of Spain,” but rather he who said Spain meant Castile. And what really granted it pre-eminence over England was its nobility, a virtue that carried with it honour. The legal and political libertas exalted two centuries earlier by Vincentius Hispanus and Lucas de Tuy was proof of the nobility of the kingdom, as was the antiquity of the lineage—the “blood”—of its kings.51 Legal independence, antiquity “of the lineage,” loyalty to the faith, and its riches were conjoined in the memory to create an image of a noble Spain/Castile, one that was more noble than all others.52 Some twenty years after Alfonso of Cartagena, the councillor of Burgos, Fernando de la Torre, alleged before King Henry IV of Castile the defence he had made of his homeland before the king of France while refuting the arguments of “a French knight.” He asserted “the fertility, excellence, and grandeur of the kingdoms of Castile,” evoking the large number of nobles, the “freedom and absolute power” of his king, his ability, and his military virtues, and the “noblility and fatness of the land” that gave “the most profitable incomes.” In conclusion, de la Torre called on his king to make an effort “to leave its history as an edification reinforced by heroics and noble examples, and to obtain laudable renown by the whole world, especially through the conservation and growth of his motherland, nation and honour.”53 For his part, in the pro­logue to his Crónica de los reyes de Navarra in 1454, the prince of Viana Charles, imprisoned in the castle of Monroy, moved by “the error of those from the past, who, we know not why, wished thus to leave memories empty by not having wanted to write the great deeds of their kings,” addressed his kingdom:

50  “La grandesa del regno”; “la fartura de la tierra”; “la muchedumbre de las gentes”; “la abun­ dancia de las riquesas.” Cited from Cartagena, “Discurso sobre la precedencia,” 218–20 and 227–29. 51  Cartagena, “Discurso sobre la precedencia,” 209–11.

52  About the concept of nobility and its evolution, see Adeline Rucquoi, “Ê� tre noble en Espagne aux xive–xvie siècles,” in Nobilitas. Funktion und Repräsentation des Adels in Alteuropa, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle and Werner Paravicini (Göttingen, 1997), 273–98; Adeline Rucquoi, “Noblesse des conversos?,” ‘Qu’un sang impur…’ Les conversos et le pouvoir en Espagne à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Jeanne Battesti-Pelegrin (Aix-en-Provence, 1997), 89–108; Adeline Rucquoi, “Mancilla y limpieza: la obsesión por el pecado en Castilla a fines del siglo XV,” in Os ‘últimos fins’ na cultura ibérica dos séculos xv–xviii (Porto, 1997), 113–35; Adeline Rucquoi, “Les villes d’Espagne: De l’histoire à la généalogie,” in Memoria, communitas, civitas. Mémoire et conscience urbaines en Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Hanno Brand, Pierre Monnet, and Martial Staub (Stuttgart, 2003), 145–66. 53  “La fertilidad, exçelencia e grandeza de los reynos de Castilla”; “libertad e poder absolute”; “nobleza e grosedad de la tierra”; “las rentas más provechosas”; “por dexar su estoria, edificaçion forneçida de nobles fazañas e enxienplos, e por aver loables renonbres por el mundo, singularmente en la conservaçion e acrecentamiento de su patria, naçion y honor.” Cited from Fernando de la Torre, Libro de las veynte cartas e quistiones y otros versos y prosas, ed. Marí�a Jesús Garretas (Segovia, 2009), 298–316.

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And you Navarre, not consenting that the other nations of Spain equal you in the antiquity of royal dignity, nor in the triumph and deservedness of loyal conquests, nor in the ancient possession of your accustomed loyalty, nor in the original lordship of your always natural kings and lords.

To this original view of peninsular history, the Prince of Viana added the preaching in Pamplona by St. Saturnine, sent there by St. Peter, as well as the list of popes, the kings of France, and some other events before reaching the founder of the kingdom, Í�ñigo Arista. He then listed Sancho III the Great, Sancho VII the Strong, and Theobald of Navarre among the notable names in the line of the kings of Navarre.54 Some authors from the mid-fifteenth century developed the theme of the lamentaciones for a Spain destruida pained, miserable, wretched, triste e temerosa, prey to all ills, still a rather feminine image;55 nonetheless, the “nobility” of Castile/Spain and its military aspect became one of the “places” or features in the collective memory.56 In the pro­logue to his Generaciones y semblanzas, written between 1450 and 1455, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán explained that he wanted to leave a memory of “magnificent kings and princes,” “brave and virtuous knights,” “as well as great sages and scholars.”57 Thirty years later, his disciple, Fernando del Pulgar justified his Claros varones de Castilla in the same way: moved by that love of my land which others have of theirs, I want to write of some illustrious men, prelates and knights, natives of your kingdoms, who I knew and who I dealt with, whose exploits and remarkable deeds, if particularly they were to be told, required to make of each one a great story.58

54  “El error de los pasados, los quales, no sabemos por qual razón”; “quisieron ansi dejar desiertas las memorias por no haber querido escribir los grandes fechos destos sus reyes”; “E tú Navarra, no consentiendo que las otras nasciones de España se igualen contigo en la antigüedad de la dignidad real, ni en el triunfo e merescimiento de fieles conquistas, ni en la antigua posesión de tu acostumbrada lealtat, ni en la original señorí�a de tus siempre naturales reyes e señores.” Cited from Carlos, prí�ncipe de Viana, Crónica de los reyes de Navarra, ed. José Yanguas y Miranda and Antonio Ubieto Arteta (Valencia, 1971), 2. 55  “[L]ament done by the Marquis prophesying the second destruction of Spain” (Lamentaçion fecha por el Marques en propheçia de la segunda destruyçion de España). Cited from Julio Rodrí�guez-Puértolas, “El libro de la Consolaçion de España. Una meditación sobre la Castilla del siglo xv,” Miscelánea de Textos Medi­evales 1 (1972): 189–212; Í�ñigo López de Mendoza, Obras, ed. José Amador de los Rí�os (Madrid, 1852), 483–86.

56  Here we use the phrase “place of memory” in the sense: “Un lieu de mémoire dans tous les sens du mot va de l’objet le plus matériel et concret, éventuellement géo­graphiquement situé, à l’objet le plus abstrait et intellectuellement construit.” See Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. in 7 (Paris, 1984–92). 57  “Los magnificos reyes e prinçipes”; “los valientes e vertuosos cavalleros”; “otrosi de los grandes sabios e letrados.” Cited from Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones y semblanzas, ed. Jesús Domí�nguez Bordona (Madrid, 1979), 6–7.

58  “Mouido con aquel amor de mi tierra que los otros ouieron de la suya, me dispuse a escreuir de algunos claros varones, perlados e caualleros, naturales de los vuestros reinos, que yo conosci y comuniqué cuyas fazañas e notables fechos, si particularmente se ouiesen de contar, requiria fazerse de cada uno una grand ystoria.” Cited from Fernando del Pulgar, Claros varones de Castilla (Buenos Aires, 1948), 12.



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In his Compendiosa historia hispanica of 1469, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo exalted the resistance of the Spaniards to the Romans and the fear they inspired in the latter.59 Then, the anonymous author of a Compendio de las crónicas de los reyes de España, dated from shortly after 1492, again emphasized the military values: Thus, the lineage of the kings of Castile, from whom your highness is descended on both sides, is most excellent, and comes from the very high and clear blood of the famous Gothic kings, who, by force of arms, did not only conquer the Spains, but also Rome, all Italy, and a large part of France, territories of which they were lords many times. So, such noble deeds are worthy of the same memory as the deeds of the Greeks and the Romans.60

The exaltation of the military hero is also found, although in an unfavourable comparison between Castilians and Italians, in Alfonso of Palencia. In 1459, he dedicated to Fernando de Guzmán his Tratado de la perfección del triunfo militar, the Spanish translation of his De perfectione militaris triumphi written three years earlier, in which he presented Exercise, personification of the Spaniard of his time, eager to “visit Triumph” and surprised that “he almost had held a contempt for Spain for many centuries.”61 In Barcelona, Exercise reached the conclusion that: I am truly very convinced that this pilgrimage would be very beneficial for our nobles, who have never left Spain and affirm that the life of everyone is most unfortunate, except that of the Spaniards, and they say this because they have never known the very fine customs of other nations. They thus make a knot of their blind opinion, that all men live in the error and think that only they have very manly chests and that they are all prudent, hard-working, cautious, and friends of all virtues.62

In France, Alfonso of Palencia placed in the mouth of a Guest (Huésped) a comparison between Spain, in which “common sadness torments,” and is “a very dark and pernicious nation because of an inner fury fond of very bad thoughts,” and France, where “the 59  Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, “Compendiosa historia hispánica,” in Hispaniae illustratae, ed. Andreas Schott (Frankfurt, 1603–8), 125–26.

60  “Asy el linaje de los reyes de Castilla de que vuestra alteza viene por amos respetos es muy exçelente ca proçede de la muy alta e clara sangre de los famosos reyes godos que, por fuerça de armas, no sola mente las Españas conquistaron, mas aun de Roma e de toda la Ytalia con mucha parte de la Françia muchas vezes se hizieron señores / y no menos dinos de memoria fueron sus notables fechos que los de los griegos e romanos.” From Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS esp. 110, fol. 1.

61  “visitar el Triunfo”; “oviese tenido ya por muy luengos siglos a España quasi en menosprecio.” Cited from Alfonso de Palencia, “Tratado de la perfeción del Triunfo militar,” in Prosistas castellanos del siglo xv, ed. Mario Penna (Madrid, 1959), 345–92. For the life and works of Alfonso of Palencia, see the pro­logue in Alfonso de Palencia, Gesta Hispaniensia ex annalibus suorum diebus collecta, ed. Brian Tate and Jeremy Lawrance, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1998), 1:xxv–lxix.

62  “De verdad me fago más cierto que a los nuestros nobles serí� a muy provechosa esta peregrinación, los quales, nunca se partiendo de España, afirman ser la vida de todos muy desventurada, salvo de los españoles, como no ayan experimentado en cosa alguna las muy buenas costumbres de las otras naciones. Assí� que se faze un nudo de la su opinión ciega, que todos los ombres bivan en error, y solamente ellos possean pechos muy varoniles, e que todos ellos sean prudentes, industriosos, cautelosos e amigos de qualquier virtud.” Cited from Palencia, “Tratado de la perfeción,” 355.

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very pure blood makes happy, a people always merry, and a happy people whose faces are always clear with a smile.”63 Exercise, however, won all the fights he was involved in there, thus showing his military superiority. On later visiting the city of Florence, Exercise reflected: Remaining in Spain, like its other inhabitants, I thought that that province not only according to the vulgar opinion exceeded any part of the world in fertility, even more in wealth and buildings, composure, virtues, power, seriousness, and in all the other assets both of fortune and of the soul,

and concludes, “And going slowly eastwards I saw composure and customs much more worthy than ours.”64 Contrasting with the pessimism of Alfonso of Palencia, the anonymous author of a presentation of the world to the young Charles I of Spain around 1516 wrote, “the people of there [France] in general are inclined to mechanical trades and to service or to study, they are not inclined to hustle and bustle nor wars and so they were dominated by the caesars without difficulty.”65 From now on, nobility and its military virtues—a masculine image—characterized Spain.

Spain and Fame

As historical works took on a greater individualized character, the authors in Iberia in the second half of the fifteenth century dedicated eulogistic pages to their heroes, past and present. In 1487, in Murcia, Canon Diego Rodrí�guez Almela published a Tratado que se llama compilación de las batallas campales, which reviewed two hundred and thirty-two battles fought in Spain, from that of Hercules against “King Geryon of Galicia” to the Castilian victory over the Portuguese at Mérida in 1479.66 Three decades earlier, the bishop of Girona, Joan Margarit i Pau (ca. 1422–1484), had undertaken the task of writing a history of the Peninsula, from its origins to the end of the Roman empire, following the fashion of contemporary Italian humanism. He had therefore begun his work with a description of the Peninsula “that, it is said, was first populated by Japheth and

63  “La común tristeza atormenta”; “una nación muy oscura et dañosa por una entrañable saña afecionada a pensamientos muy malinos”; “el muy limpio sangre alegra, una gente siempre alegre, e que siempre tiene la frente serena con riso.” Cited from Palencia, “Tratado de la perfeción,” 356–57.

64  “Yo, permaneciendo en España, como los otros moradores en ella, pensava que aquella provincia no solamente segund la vulgar opinión sobrepujava a qualesquier partes del mundo en fertilidad, mas aun en riquezas e edificios, conpostura, virtudes, poderí�o, gravedad, e en todos los otros bienes assi de fortuna como del ánimo”; “E caminando poco a poco faza oriente vi compostura e costumbres mucho más dignas que las nuestras.” Cited from Palencia, “Tratado de la perfeción,” 371–72. 65  “La gente della [Francia] en general es inclinada a oficios mecanicos e a servicio e a estudiar, no son inclinados a bollicios ni guerras e por esto los señorearon los cesares syn dyficultad.” From El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, MS M.I.16, fol. 59v. 66  Diego Rodrí�g uez de Almela, Copilación de todas las batallas campales que fueron e son acaescidas desde el comienzo del mundo fasta nuestros días (Murcia, 1487).



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his son Tubal,” followed by the arrival of the first inhabitants. Then, before mentioning the Phocaeans in the Peninsula, Joan Margarit dedicated various chapters to Hercules.67 By the end of the Middle Ages, heroes had effectively become the great protagonists in the collective memory and, among them, Hercules appeared as the “historical” founder of Spain.68 In the late-fourteenth-century, Crónica d’Espayña, drawn up by Garcí�a de Euguí�, bishop of Bayonne and confessor to kings Charles II and Charles III, the history of Navarre went back to Japheth and Tubal, to the mythical King Rocas, to Hercules, defeater of King Geryon, founder of Cadiz and La Coruña and responsible for the destruction of Troy, and to don Espan, nephew of Hercules; then, the history of the kings of Navarre began with Í�ñigo Arista (d. 851), but only after the succession of the Roman emperors, the kings of the Goths, the kings of Asturias, and the kings of Castile as far as Alfonso XI.69 “Given that it is a natural fact that everyone wishes to know and listen to noble deeds, so I, Francesc, from Barcelona, begin to dictate and organize this work called The Book of the Nobilities of Kings,” the author of its pro­logue clarified around the mid-fifteenth century, “and also, about the noble acts, courage, and chivalry that, in deeds and conquests, were made by the kings, counts, knights and valiant servants, and noble barons.”70 Among these, Hercules also played a pre-eminent role: after the destruction of Troy, the Greek hero passed through Italy and reached Spain, where he founded Cádiz and Tarazona, conquered Urgell and Vic with the help of the Count of Osona, and finally founded Barcelona. Then, in the pro­logue to his Crónica de Aragón, published in 1499 in Zaragoza, a work dedicated to “the so many nobilities and excellencies of Spain” (las tantas noblezas e exçellencias de la Hespaña), Gauberte de Vagad explained: the glory of virtue is so immortal and so marvellous in itself that, even to the trace left by its feet, even to the shadow that follows behind it / which is the illustrious memory and the excellent fame that remains of its great deeds, we see that it not only makes them immortal, but causes immortality.71

67  “Que, según dicen, fue poblada en primer lugar por Jafet y su hijo Tubal.” Cited from Joan Margarit, Paralipomenon Hispaniae libri decem (Granada, 1545); Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 5554, fols. 2v, 19v–25v. 68  Rucquoi, “Le héros avant le saint,” 55–75.

69  Aengus Ward, ed., Crónica d’Espayña de García de Euguí (Pamplona, 1999).

70  “Com sia cose natural que tota persona desige saber e hoyr nobles fets, per raho dasso yo Francescus natural de Barcelona comens a dithar e ordenar questa hobra la cal es apellade Llibre de les nobleses dels Reys; so es dels nobles fets e valenties e cavalleries que feren en fets darmes e de conquestes Reys e comtes e cavalleres e valentes servents et nobles barones.” From Barcelona, Biblio­ teca de Catalunya, MS 487. For the founding of the cities, see Rucquoi, “Les villes d’Espagne,” 145–66. 71  “Es tan immortal y tan de suyo maravillosa la gloria de la virtud: que fasta el rastro que dexan sus pies: mas fasta la sombra que sigue enpos della / que es la memoria illustre y fama tan exçellente que de sus grandes fechos queda: vemos que faze no solo ser immortales: mas causadores de imortalidad.” Cited from Gauberte Fabricio de Vagad, Cronica de los muy altos y muy poderosos principes y cristianissimos reyes del siempre constante y fidelissimo reyno de Aragón (Zaragoza, 1499), first pro­logue, accessed June 13, 2019, http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000098945&page=1.

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Fame, in other words, the memory of an individual through the centuries, became the ideal that everyone aspired to, long before eternal salvation.72 And, at the end of the Middle Ages, military exploits delivered this fame. Hercules, like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Pelagius, El Cid, Gerald the Fearless (Geraldo Sempavor), Ferdinand III of Castile, or Guzmán the Good, would henceforth populate the collective memory in Spain and become a social ideal. In his Universal vocabulario, Alfonso of Palencia claimed, “Memory is the record of what has been discovered and is known” and added, “It is called memorable if it deserves praise, honour, and permanent record.”73 Honour, a characteristic of the noble, was thus intimately linked to memory, a memory that, on being written, or “narrated,” became history.

Conclusion

Memory—known or invented—played an essential role in the creation of a Hispanic culture in the Middle Ages. The origin of the Spaniards (Tubal, son of Japheth and grandson of Noah, the founder of the nation; Hercules when he killed the “tyrant” Geryon; and the creation of a specific dynasty with Hispan) takes place in a well-defined space, characterized by its climate, fertility, and richness of its land. “Spain,” a terrestrial paradise, was the protagonist. The valour of its “naturals”—the word clearly indicating a relationship between the inhabitants of Spain and the land according to natural or divine law, and thus not subject to human fickleness—was manifested collectively, for example, when the people spilt their blood for this land, and individually, through exaltation of specific “heroes.” From the thirteenth century onwards, this valour took the form of the defence of the faith or of scholarship, but the saints, confessors, or martyrs, and the philosophers evoked in the histories progressively give way to “heroes” whose personae combined lineage, wealth, and military prowess. This memory, with slight differences between the various Iberian kingdoms, undoubtedly helped create a common memory, a shared culture, as José Antonio Maravall has shown. Importantly, it was not an exclusively “Christian” culture. The figure of Hispan as an eponymous hero came from Andalusian historio­graphy, as did that of Cava, the cause of the perdition of Spain, and the first historians of al-Andalus again affirmed that Spain had been given to the Muslims as a reward from God. The translatio studii from the East, whether the East of the mythical King Rocas, or Athens, tended to show for the Jews and the Christians that Spain was the ultimate repository of learning, the last link in a long history shared by Spaniards, whatever their religion. Within this para72  Adeline Rucquoi, “Privauté, Fortune et politique: La chute d’Á� lvaro de Luna,” in Der Fall des Günstlings. Hofparteien in Europa vom 13. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Jan Hirschbiegel and Werner Paravicini (Ostfildern, 2004), 287–310. 73  “Memoria es recordación de lo inventado o sabido; Memorabile se dize lo que es loable, e diziendo de honor: e de perpetua recordación.” Cited from Palencia, Universal vocabulario, fol. 273v; John M. Hill, “Universal vocabulario” de Alfonso de Palencia. Registro de voces españolas internas (Madrid, 1957), 119.



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disiacal place, artistic techniques, ideas, and forms coexisted and circulated between the north and south of the Peninsula. The “Spanish” identity founded on this memory, which combined eulogies for the land, exaltation of the courage of its inhabitants, and a special relation with God, earned the Spaniards a reputation for arrogance. In Naples, in 1505, Antonio de Ferrariis spoke about the Spanish and the French as “the last among men and the worst,” “lashing out at them for their pride, intemperance, insolence, greed, and ingratitude, and recalls that in what concern themselves, the Spaniards spare no praise.”74 Almost thirty years later, the King of France, Francis I, would write to the Spanish ambassador that he would be very happy “to see the clause in Adam’s will which excludes him from his share when the world was divided,” in a clear allusion to the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494.75 Convinced of their rights and that they were the happy natives of a blessed land, the Spaniards undertook the conquest of the New World with the aim of making it into a New Spain, an even more ideal Spain. And, as Peter Martyr d’Anghiera wrote to the Count of Tendilla and viceroy of Granada in 1510: “Let’s go back to those new lands now. They are countless, varied, fortunate. The Spaniards of our time are in no way inferior to Saturn, Hercules, or any of the ancients who sought new horizons and guided them towards culture.”76

74  “Ii sunt ultimi homines et pessimi”; “[…] ad castigandam Gallorum et Hispanorum qui nos opprimunt superbiam, intemperantiam, insolentiam, avaritiam, ingratitudinem”; “Hanc educationem maxime probant Hispani in sui laudem profusissimi.” Cited from Antonio de Ferrariis, al. Galateo, De Educatione, ed. Carlo Vecce and Pol Tordeur (Leuven, 1993), 54, 64, 104.

75  Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, I: Les vaines tentatives, 1524–1603 (Montréal, 1963), 133–34.

76  “Ad nouas iam terras, a quibus digressi sumus, redeamus. Innumerae sunt, uariae, fortunatae. Non Saturno, non Herculi, non cuique ueterum qui nouas oras quaeritauerint ad cultumque redegerint, nostri iuniores cedent Hispani.” Cited from Pierre Martyr d’Anghiera, De Orbe Novo Decades. I. Oceana Decas, ed. Brigitte Gauvin (Paris, 2003), 231.

Chapter 7

THE LEGEND OF THE PRINCESS OF NAVARRE: A FOUNDING MYTH IN THE SARDINIAN CONFLICT AGAINST THE KINGS OF ARAGON LUCIANO GALLINARI After nearly three decades of peaceful coexistence within the specific area of Sardinia, around the mid-fourteenth century, the relationship between the king of Aragon, as sovereign of the kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica, and the Giudice of Arborea began to change.1 At that moment, Giudice Marianus IV was at a crossroads: to remain a faithful vassal of the king of Aragon and to reconcile himself to a reduced role in the island; or to respond to a policy of increasing political and institutional centralization by King Peter the Ceremonious, clearly evident in the annexation of the Kingdom of Mallorca to his Crown a few years earlier. By then, the formative period of the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica was over, and the Aragonese monarch was keen to consolidate its rule on the island, where the Giudicato of Arborea extended over a significant part of the island 1  On April 4, 1297, Pope Boniface VIII established the Regnum Sardinië et Corsice and enfeoffed it to the Aragonese monarch James II, as a reward for ceding the Kingdom of Sicily, conquered in 1282 after the clash with the House of Anjou. He did so to persuade James to act against the Church’s enemies, whilst giving effective authority to the pope, albeit indirectly, over the two Tyrrhenian islands, since previously papal prerogatives had been hampered by the political activity of Pisa, Genoa, and the Empire. The pope also wanted to strengthen the Guelph party through James II who, through his family connections with the Hohenstaufen dynasty, seemed to have been the hero of the pro-empire forces. The real conquest of the Regnum took place only after three decades of diplomatic negotiations, following a successful military campaign led by the dauphin Alfonso, between 1323 and 1326, against the Republic of Pisa, which still held one third of Sardinia. See Antonio Arribas Palau, La conquista de Cerdeña por Jaime II de Aragón (Barcelona, 1952); Vicente Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterranea (Madrid, 1956); Francesco Cesare Casula, La Sardegna aragonese, 2 vols. (Sassari, 1990); Mauro G. Sanna, “Papa Giovanni XXII, Giacomo II d’Aragona e la questione del Regnum Sardinie et Corsice,” in Tra diritto e storia. Studi in onore di Luigi Berlinguer promossi dalle Università di Siena e di Sassari, 2 vols. (Soveria Mannelli, 2008), 2:737–52; Mauro G. Sanna, “La Sardegna, il Papato e le dinamiche delle espansioni mediterranee,” in La Sardegna nel Mediterraneo tardomedi­evale. Convegno di studi (Sassari, 13–14 dicembre 2012) (Trieste, 2013), 103–21; Maria Eugenia Cadeddu, “L’espansione catalanoaragonese nel Mediterraneo: riflessi nella storiografia iberica contemporanea,” in Quel mar che la terra inghirlanda. Studi mediterranei in ricordo di Marco Tangheroni, ed. Franco Cardini and Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut (Rome, 2007), 149–56. Luciano Gallinari ([email protected]) is Ricercatore in Medi­eval History at the Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea–Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Cagliari, Italy.

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Regnum that was in effect divided in two. A divided Sardinia but with an increasingly dominant Arborea, one of the four post-Byzantine-era polities of the island, made the now-hereditary judge as head of each giudicato a threat to countries like Aragon. Moreover, a recent rebellion by Aragonese nobles, defeated in É� pila, meant that Peter the Ceremonious was even more wary of the situation in Sardinia.2 This Sardinian crisis was part of a broader international context. Indeed, the island was at the heart of a conflict between the Crown of Aragon and the Republic of Genoa for supremacy in the western Mediterranean, particularly following the Battle of the Bosphorus (the Byzantine–Genoese War (1348–1349) when the two powers had clashed.3 According to Aragonese sources, the problems between the Giudice of Arborea, the Governor-General of the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica, and royal officials had begun de facto in 1351. Marianus IV had openly broken with the Aragonese because of attitudes shown by the governor. The latter, consequently, begun to drum up charges from several witnesses who knew facts or deeds attributable to the judge. Some allegations concerned Marianus IV’s request to the Roman Pontiff to enfeoff him with the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae in 1351. No other source confirms such an attempt by the judge to be invested with the Regnum. We should be aware that this information came from a councillor of the Regnum’s capital and, so, someone with a political function and “closer” to the king and his officials, who were gathering evidence. If it was a manoeuvre, it did not succeed.4 As a result of attacks on the Aragonese in Sardinia by Genoa—ally of the Doria family, who had granted the town of Alghero in north-western Sardinia to the Ligurian Republic—Peter the Ceremonious of Aragon decided to intervene. In July 1353, Peter ordered

2  At É� pila in 1348, the royal army, under Lope de Luna, obtained a resounding victory against the Aragonese nobility, who had previously forced the king into humiliating limitations of his authority and heavily influenced his political decisions. Rafael Tasis i Marca, Pere el Cerimoniós i el seus fills (Barcelona, 1957), 40–48.

3  For more details on the Battle of the Bosphorus as well as on this decisive period in the relationship between Aragon and Genoa see Giuseppe Meloni, “Cenni sulle relazioni tra Genova e l’Aragona nel secolo xiv (1351–1360),” in La Corona de Aragón en el siglo xiv, 3 vols. (Valencia, 1973), 3:118–24; and for its wider aspects see Giuseppe Meloni, Genova e Aragona all’epoca di Pietro il Cerimonioso, 3 vols. (Padua, 1971–82). See also Geo Pistarino, “Genova e Barcellona: incontro e scontro di due civiltà,” in Atti del I congresso storico Liguria–Catalogna, (Ventimiglia– Bordighera–Albenga–Finale–Genova, 14–19 ottobre 1969) (Bordighera, 1974), 81–122. 4  We have a deposition by Francesc Corrall, councillor of Castell de Càller, dated July 5, 1353: “The Giudice of Arborea prepared now an armed boat and sent it to the pope, which should have returned by the end of June, after the month of May immediately following. And the same Giudice warned his subjects and made them ready for taking arms and for other needs, and this since he had implored the pope in order to give to the same Giudice the above-mentioned island, and after the concession he [the judge] should declare himself king of the same island” (dictus iudex Arboree preparabat iam tunc unum lembum armatum et destinaverat ad dominum papam, qui lembus debebat redisse per totum mensem iunii post dictum mensem madii inmediate sequentem. Et quod faciebat idem iudex preparari et premuniri gentes suas armis et aliis necessariis et hoc quia suplicabat dicto domino pape quod donaret eidem iudici insulam supradictam, et facta donacionem debebat se facere et levare regem insule eiusdem). From Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancilleria, Procesos contra los Arborea, II, fol. 12r.



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an inquiry into the earlier dispute between the Regnum’s Governor-General, Rambau de Corbera, and the judge. The king also authorized Admiral Bernat de Cabrera to attack Marianus IV who, according to records provided by the governor-general, had chosen to ally himself with whoever would be the winner between the Crown and Genoa, thereby rejecting his duties as a vassal.5 In August, the great naval battle of Porto Conte took place, between the Venetian– Aragonese fleet and the Genoese one. It ended with Genoa’s defeat and the conquest of Alghero by the Aragonese, who repopulated it entirely with peoples from the Iberian Peninsula.6 As a result of Marianus IV’s behaviour during this war against Genoa and the rebellion of the Doria shortly afterwards, Peter the Ceremonious informed the Pope that he intended to inquire into the judge’s rebellion against him. The king emphasized one particular aspect, which seemed to him the most dangerous since it was upsetting the public order: “this judge being a vassal and subject of the king had taken an oath of allegiance by the subjects of the king, he usurps deliberately and efficaciously the jurisdiction of his prince and natural lord.”7 In the light of these events, and others that we will not discuss, Admiral Bernat de Cabrera on September 7, 1353, notified his intention to take the judge to trial for rebellion against his lord:

5  On the insurrection of Marianus IV, an important chronicle supports the judge, reporting that he acted in response to Admiral Cabrera’s attitude, who had committed various acts to the detriment of the judge. See Memoria de las cosas que han aconteçido en algunas partes del reino de Cerdeña, ed. Paolo Maninchedda (Cagliari, 2000), 48.

6  This was a considerable defeat for the Genoese fleet, losing thirty-three galleys. Meloni, “Cenni sulle relazioni,” 118–24; and for a more general discussion Meloni, Genova e Aragona. See also Giovanna Petti Balbi, “Tra dogato e principato: il Tre e il Quattrocento,” in Storia di Genova. Medi­ terraneo, Europa, Atlantico, ed. Dino Puncuh (Genoa, 2003), 255–56 and 263.

7  “Lo dit jutge estan vassall e sotsmes del dit senyor rey ha pres sagrament de faeltat dels dits sotsmeses del dit senyor rey, volent et efficaciter se usurpa juredicció et senyoria de son prí�ncep et senyor natural.” From Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancilleria, Procesos contra los Arborea, III, fols. 107r–108r. Fabrizio Fabbrini, “‘Auctoritas’, ‘Potestas’ e ‘Iurisdictio’ in diritto romano,” Apollinaris 51, nos. 1–2 (1978): 492 n. 2, 493 n. 3, and 497; in which Fabbrini takes the definition of Thomas Aquinas according to which jurisdiction is public power for the common good—almost literally couched in that of Justinian—and points out that the term iurisdictio, together with potestas and auctoritas, meant “power,” in the sense of public authority in a broader and much more technical sense than the Romanist one, which indicated simply judicial authority. To be precise, iurisdictio expressed a well-defined concept, developed and framed in earlier legal frameworks, by which was usually meant a “judicial function,” that is, a function performed by a magistrate in charge of the justice’s administration. Besides this specific meaning, iurisdictio was also used to designate the supreme function of public authority and which soon came to include also regulatory power. Peter the Ceremonious’s emphasis on his status as “natural lord” of all the people of the kingdom—including of course the Giudice of Arborea—served to secure himself loyalty and obedience higher than those associated with any other political power. See Miguel Á� ngel Ladero Quesada, “Poderes públicos en la Europa medi­eval (Principados, Reinos y Coronas),” in Poderes públicos en la Europa medi­eval: Principados, reinos y coronas. xxiii Semana de Estudios Medi­evales, Estella, 22 a 26 de julio de 1996 (Pamplona, 1997), 19–68 at 44.

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As the excellent Giudice of Arborea, as we know, wished to turn his heel from Oroseus, against the royal majesty. Therefore, with the authority of the office we justly have in the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica, we begin a process against the aforesaid judge.8

It is clear from these few passages that the clash between the Aragonese kings and the judges of Arborea, which would last for about seventy years, before taking on a military aspect was preceded by political and legal struggles. This legal process required both sides to elaborate refined “discourses,” and seek from the Apostolic See—holder of the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae—approval for their conduct on one hand and condemnation of the opponent’s behaviour on the other hand.9 Catalan–Aragonese sources present the mid-fourteenth-century situation and are the only ones that allow reconstruction of the course of the events in some detail. A widely known problem for Sardinian history is the paucity of local medi­eval sources, public and/or private, that can counterbalance external, mainly Iberian, sources. Only the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó offers a wide range of records, parchments, diplomas, and charters on Sardinia from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, not to mention other archives in territories formerly under the Crown of Aragon. In addition, there are a large number of sources originating from the Italian peninsula. This means that texts need to be read carefully, particularly for their semantic and cultural meaning if we want to achieve a more reliable and accurate understanding of events in Sardinia. One effect of the paucity of the island’s sources has been historical accounts that say more than the sources can support.10 Despite the extreme scarcity of records by Sardinian authors, an important insular view of events is offered by a long-known chronicle, which has drawn scholarly attention in recent years: the Memoria de las cosas que han aconteçido en algunas partes del reino de Cerdeña.11 It provides not only information on events but the views of the 8  “Cum egregius vir iudex Arboree calcaneum sue de Urisei erigere, ut accepimus, intendat contra regiam magestatem. Qua de re nos auctoritate officii, quo fungimur in dicto Regno Sardinie et Corsice iuste certos, incohavimus processus facere contra iudicem supradictum.” Cited from Sara Chirra, ed., Proceso contra los Arborea. Voll. II–III. Collezione di documenti per il Regno di Sardegna (Pisa, 2003), 220 (September 7, 1353, Alghero).

9  On these “discourses” see Luciano Gallinari, “Alcuni ‘discorsi’ politici e istituzionali nello scontro tra Pietro IV d’Aragona e Mariano IV d’Arborea,” in Sardegna e Mediterraneo tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna. Studi in onore di Francesco Cesare Casula, ed. Maria Giuseppina Meloni and Olivetta Schena (Genoa, 2009), 149–83; Luciano Gallinari, “An Important Political Discourse Pro-Judicate of Arborea Drawn up in the Capital of the Catalan-Aragonese Regnum Sardinie et Corsice (14th-15th c.),” in Centri di potere nel Mediterraneo occidentale dal Madioevo alla fine dell’Antico Regime, ed. Lluí�s J. Guia Marin, Maria Grazia Rosaria Mele, and Giovanni Serreli (Milan, 2018), 65–73. 10  Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire. Texte intégral (Paris, 1996), 31.

11  The Memoria is an anonymous chronicle of real and legendary events that took place between 1005 and 1479, of which we do not have the original. It was probably composed at the end of the fifteenth century in Cagliari in the church of San Francesco, as a compilation from previous documentary and narrative sources from Sardinia, Italy, and Catalonia of different ages and origins. Our copy was written in Castilian perhaps between 1570 and 1585, drawing on material dating back to a period of time between 1329 (when Iberian monks replaced pro-Pisan brothers at San Francesco) and 1364–1370, when the war between the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae and



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author and suggests his likely identity and something of his own psycho­logy, cultural background, and his own perception of fourteenth-century Sardinia, both in the Regnum and in the Giudicato of Arborea.12 In view of this, we need to be careful with the termino­ logy in this source, and others from the island, in order to go beyond the more immediately obvious meaning,13 remembering that “La fonction du langage n’est pas d’informer, mais d’évoquer.”14 Close reading allows a careful historian to decipher the political and institutional discourse on the relationship between the judges of Arborea and the kings of Aragon. This source conveys a positive view of Arborea, helping to create a status of kingship for this family of Sardinian rulers, whose origin was linked to the Iudex Sardiniae, institutionally dating back to the island’s Byzantine rule. The Memoria offers a reconstruction of key events between the Sardinians and the Aragonese, presented very differently to their contemporary Iberian sources, prompting us to reflect on the aims of the authors. Certainly, one aim was to strengthen the image of the Giudici of Arborea’s family, in two ways. First, the politico-institutional bond between the island rulers and the Aragonese kings is presented differently from the simple link by vassalage, established in 1323. We provide only brief examples of this, as it is not central to the focus of this work. Secondly, it creates family links between the judge’s dynasty and the lineage of the Navarrese kings, which is discussed in greater detail. Within this “discourse” on the Giudicato dynasty, a theoretically helpful argument, such as the appointment of Barisone I of Arborea as King of Sardinia in 1164 by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, was not used, even though the Memoria mentions Barisone, albeit with an incorrect name, when the anonymous chronicle narrated the family union between the rulers of Arborea and the kings of Aragon. It is hard to believe that within the circles close to the House of Arborea, who produced the documents examined here, the memory of such an important event had been lost. So we might infer that this appointment was not used in this dynastic “discourse” since it was made by the emperor and not the pope, at a time—the fourteenth century—when the judges were asking the Apostolic See to be invested with the Regnum instead of the kings of Aragon. As far as the politico-institutional bond between Sardinia and Aragon is concerned, it should, indeed, be emphasized how the Memoria is devoid of the slightest reference to the enfeoffment of the Giudicato of Arborea granted to Giudice Hugh II and his vassalage to the King of Aragon. The omission of this link in the Memoria is such that when reading the Giudice of Arborea began. It appears to be a text characterized by an interesting recovery of popular legends, behind which we can find a para-literary tradition that is also relevant from a historical-political point of view. See Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, xi–xxvii.

12  Jurghis Baltrušaitis, Lo specchio. Rivelazioni, inganni e sciénce-fiction (Milan, 1981), 173 and 182; Andrea Tagliapietra, La metafora dello specchio. Lineamenti per una storia simbolica (Milan, 1991), 9; Antonio di Ciaccia and Massimo Recalcati, Jacques Lacan. Un insegnamento sul sapere dell’inconscio (Milan, 2000), 23.

13  “[S]i on veut interpréter, alors les mots deviennent texte à fracturer pour qu’on puisse voir émerger en pleine lumière cet autre sens qu’ils cachent; enfin il arrive au langage de surgir pour lui-même en un acte d’écrire qui ne désigne rien de plus que soi.” Cited from Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses. Une archéo­logie des sciences humaines (Paris, 1966), 315. 14  Cited from Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris, 1966), 247.

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the narrative it is unclear why the judge would support the dauphin Alfonso and his military conquest of the island. It is noticeable that, in its narrative, this insular source “forgets” to mention the bond of vassalage that had been the backbone to all relationships between Aragonese kings and Sardinian judges from 1323, if not since the enfeoffment of April 4, 1297.15 The reason the bond was omitted is that it was perceived as something that would diminish Arborea’s rulers, whose status, on the contrary, they wished to praise. Indeed, the Memoria portrays the Sardinian ruler as a powerful character with money and military strength, and the chronicle stretches as far as bestowing on him a role that not only is never found in the Aragonese documents, which is self-evident, but it is also not present even in the narrative and documentary sources from the Italian peninsula. Conversely, two important Catalan–Aragonese literary sources highlight precisely the feudal bond that was the legal base of the relationship between the Aragonese monarchs and the judges of Arborea: In the siege of Villa di Chiesa, on July 3, the Giudice of Arborea came in company with Sardinian knights and foot soldiers, paid homage to the dauphin, and acknowledged that he had all his land in fief by the king.16

All these elements confirm what is claimed by anthropo­logists: that identity is the result of a relentless selective process, which maintains some elements and forgets or discards others, intentionally or not.17 Indeed, it was recently reaffirmed that this selection process is the very foundation of what anthropo­logy defines as identity.18 Let us look at some examples of this. Giudice Hugh II (1321–1336) carried out in person the building of the first Catalan settlement in Sardinia, which would have hosted the dauphin Alfonso and his troops in relation to the siege of Castel di Castro of Cagliari (1324–1326); even the choice of its name—Bonayre—can be attributed to him: 15  For the papal bull with which Boniface VIII created and enfeoffed the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae see Vicente Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterranea de la Corona de Aragón, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1956), 2:22–30 (document 21).

16  “En lo setge de Vila d’Esgleies, a tres dies del mes de juliol, venc lo jutge d’Arborea ab companya dels sards a cavall e de peu, e féu homenatge al senyor infant e regonec a tenir tota la sua terra en feu per lo senyor rei.” Cited from Pere el Cerimoniós, “Crònica de Pere el Cerimoniós,” Les quatre grans cròniques, ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona, 1971), 1011 (chap. 1, 17).

17  Maria Maddalena Mapelli and Umberto Margiotta, eds., Dai blog ai social network (Milan, 2009), 10.

18  Ugo Fabietti and Vincenzo Matera, Memorie e identità. Simboli e strategie del ricordo (Rome, 1999), 14; and Francesco Remotti, L’ossessione identitaria (Rome, 2010), 12: “We have to consider the identity in terms of experience of relationships: what can happen happens through a relationship; it is what this relationship generates. It is here that we must return to the historicity of culture, as an entity that changes but does not necessarily ‘lose the memory’ of what were” (dobbiamo considerare le identità nei termini dell’esperienza delle relazioni: ciò che può accadere, accade attraverso un rapporto; è ciò che tale rapporto genera. È� qui che dobbiamo tornare alla storicità della cultura, come entità che cambia ma non necessariamente ‘perde la memoria’ di ciò che è stata).



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The Giudice […] settled himself in a place called now Bonayre, and there he established the place where the dauphin could settle in with all his people. He built large moats and palisades and fortified himself conveniently, and then he called it Bonayre.19

However, the version of events given by Aragonese sources is very different: Or:

And after he (the dauphin Alfonso) went to Cagliari and he built in front of Castell de Càller a castle and a village and he called them the Castle of Bonaria.20 Item, it was decided that all the galleys and other vessels that were in that place of Canyelles […] had to go to that Gulf of Cagliari, and this is because winter had already begun. […] And so it was done and they were placed in front of that castle, on a hill called Bonaria, which they walled and fortified.21

A second example is when the Memoria’s anonymous author points out the warm reception granted by the Aragonese prince and his entourage to the Giudice during the siege of the city of Villa di Chiesa, which had been suggested by the Giudice himself. The reception recognized the important role he had played in the Iberians’ arrival in Sardinia and the support he had given to their campaign to conquer Pisa’s insular possessions: The dauphin, when he saw or knew that the Giudice was coming, he rode together with all the nobles and came forward over two miles to receive them with great triumph of trumpets and drums and, then, he took the Giudice to his side and went to Villa di Chiesa.22

Contrast the version of one of the two Aragonese sources mentioned above:

in Palma di Sulci […] and as soon as the Giudice of Arborea was here with all his army, he recognized him [the Dauphin Alfonso] as his lord. And here he followed the judge’s advice, whereby the dauphin had to go and besiege Villa di Chiesa, and the Giudice did so since from Villa di Chiesa arose great problems for his homeland, larger than those coming from Cagliari or other places.23

19  “El júdice […] púsose en un lugar que agora dizen Bonayre, y allí� preparó el lugar do pudiese aposentarse el señor infante con toda su gente. Fizo grandes cavas y palenques y forteleçióse muy bien, y entonçes le puso nombre Bonayre.” Cited from Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, 34. 20  “E puis ven-se’n [the dauphin Alfonso] en Càller, e edificà davant lo castell de Càller un castell e una vila, e mès-li nome de castell de Bonaire.” Cited from Muntaner, “Crònica,” 915–16 (chap. 274).

21  “Item fo acordat que totes les galees e altre navili, qui eran en lo dit lloc de Canyelles […] se’n anassen en lo dit golf de Càller, e açò per lo hivern que ja comensava […] E així� fon fet que es posaren denant lo dit castell, en un puig que ha nom Bonaire, lo qual muraren e enfortiren.” Cited from El Cerimoniós, “Crònica de Pere el Cerimoniós,” 1011 (chap. 1, 21). 22  “El infante, quando vido o supo que vení�a el júdice, cavalga con todos los prinçipales señores et sale mas de dos millas a los reçebir con gran triumpho de trompetas y atabales y así� lo tomó a su costado y se fueron sobre villa de Iglesias.” Cited from Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, 31 and 35.

23  “A Palma de Sols […]. E tantost fo aquí� lo jutge d’Arborea ab tot son poder, qui el reebé per senyor […]. E aquí� feu d’acord ab consell del jutge, que el señor infant anàs assetjar Viladesglesies; e açò feu lo jutge con per Viladesglesies venia gran mal a la sua terra, major que per Càller ne per altre lloc.” Cited from Muntaner, “Crònica,” 915 (chap. 273).

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According to the Memoria, another indication of the Giudice’s relevance is the fact that he arrived at Villa di Chiesa proceeding to the side of the dauphin Alfonso; the town eventually surrendered to the latter: “And so they came to Villa di Chiesa, where the dauphin and the Giudice and all the people came in with great triumph, showing great joy and celebrations.”24 According to this source, Hugh II is always explicitly shown to the side of the Infante, even when he left Villa di Chiesa for Castel di Cagliari, whereas all the other nobles, who had contributed to the military accomplishment, are mentioned in a general way. This is even more interesting if we consider that Hugh II did not go immediately to Castel di Cagliari but only two days after the battle against the Pisans, as reported by the Catalan chronicler Muntaner: “And the Giudice of Arborea came here [Castel di Cagliari] with all his army, two days after the battle and he had great joy and pleasure for the victory God awarded to the dauphin.”25 This chronicler added that it was not the judge’s fault if he did not take part in the battle as, following the conquest of Villa di Chiesa, dauphin Alfonso had allowed him to go back to the Giudicato to take care of some issues and to join the Catalan–Aragonese army afterwards in Castel di Cagliari. Needless to say, there is no record of such permission to leave the royal army camp in the Memoria, where the Giudice of Arborea featured as a protagonist. Even the Llibre de Pere el Cerimoniós (the Chronicle of King Peter the Ceremonious) reports only his father’s entry into the town previously held by Pisans, which surrendered to him. I have elsewhere described further examples of this pro-Arborean reconstruction of events in the Memoria.26

The Power of Myth: The Princess of Navarre and the Judges of Arborea

I now wish to focus on a supposed event narrated by the anonymous Memoria chronicle since, on the one hand, it offers insights into political and cultural “discourses” made by the supporters of the House of Arborea in their opposition to Aragonese sovereignty, while, on the other hand, it also shows the level of sophistication achieved by such “discourses.” The case in point is the tradition of an alleged dynastic connection between an anonymous princess of Navarre and the dynasty of the Giudici of Arborea, dating back to the eleventh century. In addition to the Memoria, another Sardinian source, Giovanni Francesco Fara’s De rebus sardois—even allowing for differences due to its composition and date of production—offers a variant account of the arrival of the Navarrese princess in Sardinia and her subsequent settling on the island.27 24  “Y así� dieron a villa de Igleias, do el señor infante y júdice con toda la gente entraron con gran triunfo, haziendo muchas alegrí�as y fiestas.” Cited from Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, 39. 25  “E lo jutge d’Arborea fo aquí� [in Castel di Cagliari] ab tot son poder, al segon jorn que la batalla fo feita, e hac gran goig e gran plaer de la victòria que Déus hac donada al senyor infant.” Cited from Muntaner, “Crònica,” 918 (chap. 275).

26  Luciano Gallinari, “Ethnic Identity in Medi­eval Sardinia: Rethinking and Reflecting on 14th and 15th Century Examples,” in Perverse Identities. Identities in conflict, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Bern, 2015), 81–117.

27  Giovanni Francesco Fara (b. Sassari, 1543–d. Bosa, 1591) is considered the most important



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The two narrative sources allow us to explore ethno-historical interpretations of the relationship between the Arborea’s Giudicato and Aragon’s kings. But they also portray an important element in the process of building identity, of an individual or of entire communities, namely myth.28 Performing the myth—in our case, its reading—is never random but is always linked to certain ritual occasions and functions as a ritual itself.29 The presence of this legend within the fifteenth-century anonymous chronicle reveals a concrete example of how the circumstances of the present (in this case, the fourteenth century when these documents were drafted) imply, necessarily and often implicitly, a discourse about what we are not, in relation to what we could be and what other cultures are.30 What I want to propose is an interpretation of the tradition about a family connection between the rulers of the dynasty of Arborea and the royal family of Navarre as a kind of myth, and that, if it does not provide a “native” foundation for the dynasty of the Giudici of Arborea (as both Sardinian sources prove its existence even before the Iberian princess’s arrival on the island), it does at least qualify the link with Iberia. The correlation between the myth and this dynasty is revealed by the fact that both the Memoria and the De rebus sardois make explicit reference to the princess of Navarre’s transfer from the east coast of Sardinia—after a short stay following the sinking of the boat there—to the area of Capo S. Marco del Sinis, near the city of Tharros, capital of the Giudicato of Arborea prior to 1070. Fara’s narrative reads: “Orrocus or Orzocorus Zori was Giudice of Arborea. […] He took his wife Nivata and from the city of Tharros, called San Marco, with all the people he emigrated to Oristano.”31 When carefully examined, the tradition of the princess seems to be composed of two parts, which may have a different origin. The first consists in the arrival in the Ogliastra region of a representative of the Navarre dynasty and her numerous attendants, as was the custom for a noble of her rank.32 The second part, however, is related to her journey from the east coast of Sardinia to the west coast, till her arrival in the Sinis region. ReliSardinian historian of the sixteenth century. He published the first volume of his De rebus sardois in 1580, while the other three were only published in the nineteenth century.

28  Myth has a triple function in relation to human identity: it functions as a guarantee of reality, as a humanization of randomness and, finally, as a justification of human identity in the world. For this wealth of meanings and its “vital” functions, the world of myth is considered to occupy the sphere of “the sacred.” See Vittorio Lanternari, Identità e differenza: percorsi storico-antropo­logici (Naples, 1986), 123–24. 29  Lanternari, Identità e differenza, 95 and 103.

30  Fabietti and Matera, Memorie e identità, 11.

31  “Orrocus zeu Orzocorus Zori fuit iudex Arboreae […] Hic Nivatam uxorem duxit et ex urbe Tharrae, dicta Sancti Marci, cum omni populo in Aristanum commigravit.” A few decades after the arrival of the Navarrese in Tharros, according to Fara in 1052, the city was abandoned by the Giudice and the Archbishop of Arborea who in 1070 moved further inland to Oristano, which became the capital of the Giudicato until 1410. See Ioannis Franciscus Fara, “De Rebus Sardois,” in Opera, ed. Enzo Cadoni (Sassari, 1992), 322 (book 2, tome 2).

32  The editor (Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, xxii), claims that the tradition concerning the foundation of the church of S. Maria Navarrese is one of the oral sources of his chronicle and characterized by chrono­logical vagueness and a legendary tone (see n. 47 further below).

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able data on the first part of the tradition exist: a village on the eastern coast of Sardinia is called Santa Maria Navarrese and inside its small, mid-eleventh-century church, dedicated to the Virgin, an interesting object of Mozarabic art of that period was found, a reliquary with Kufic inscriptions.33 The second part of the tradition, instead, has its source in the Memoria and Fara. This observation implies that, probably in order to develop their political and institutional “discourse” directed to increase the prestige of the House of Arborea, the authors of the Memoria and De rebus sardois drew on a pre-existing legend or tradition associated with the aforementioned village and its church. Furthermore, they seem to have added a tale of the Princess of Navarre’s later journey to the Arborea’s shores, creating a connection between the Giudicato dynasty of Arborea and the royal one of Navarre. A closer look at the tales of those events suggests that perhaps this tradition reached the two narrative texts, the focus of our research, through different channels. The split into two parts and the clear political and institutional purpose of the tale behind the Memoria and Fara could also account for the choice of princess and her entourage landing on the Arborea coast, after having circumnavigated half of Sardinia without finding any other place suitable for their settlement. Of the two, the Memoria provides the most detailed text, and it seems possible to detect an attempt to give more prestige to the judges from Oristano as well as to provide them further tools for their fight against the Aragonese kings. Another significant difference between the two texts lies in the reason for the trip bringing the princess to the island. According to the Memoria, she was sent into exile by her father, having committed a sin with a knight of the kingdom, whereas Fara claims that she had been kidnapped behind her father’s back. Here is the text in the Memoria: [the princess and the other components of the trip] crossed the Gulf of Lion and they landed, almost miraculously because of the bad weather in Sardinia, in an area called Ogliastra. […] After ten or twelve days, […] the first thing they did and arranged to make was a church, and they called it Santa Maria of Navarre. […] Then […] seeing, after a short period of time, the land was not as good as they wished it to be, all or the majority of them decided to leave. And they went to Arborea in the region of San Marco del Sinis and established their group and began to live in greater rest, because they found many houses built in the age of the Moors, as well as villas and fortified buildings.34

33  The building of the church is explicitly mentioned in Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, 5–6: “and the first thing they did and arranged was a church, and they called it Santa Maria of Navarre. This was the first church built by Christians” (et lo primero que hizieron et hordenaron fue una iglesia, et pusieronle nombre Sancta Maria de Nabarra. Esta fue la primera iglesia que christanos hizieron). On the reliquary of Santa Maria Navarrese, see Maria Freddi, “Un gioiello mussulmano a Santa Maria Navarrese,” Studi Sardi 16 (1960): 383–90; Fabio Pinna, “Le testimonianze archeo­logiche relative ai rapporti tra gli Arabi e la Sardegna nel medioevo,” RiMe. Rivista dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea 4 (2010): 11–37, esp. 28–29; Roberto Coroneo, “Il reliquiario di Santa Maria Navarrese e altre tracce materiali della presenza islamica in Sardegna,” in Forme e storia. Scritti di arte medi­evale e moderna per Francesco Gandolfo, ed. Walter Angelelli and Francesca Pomarici (Rome, 2011), 119–25. 34  “[the princess and the other components of the trip] passaron el golfo de León et casi



Compare Fara’s version:

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In another year, 1052, the daughter of the king of Navarre, kidnapped unbeknown to her father, driven by exile and a storm to Sardinia, with her allies settled in the region of Ogugliastri where she founded the temple of St. Mary of Navarre, and because of the region’s malice she was forced to leave, and she moved to the region of Arborea, in the district of San Marco del Sinis, and she lived in a deserted Muslim village.35

The different reasons given for the trip—besides the fact that Fara also indicated an exact date of the princess’s arrival in Sardinia (1052)—are significant because they suggest the historian has been able to access sources different from those used by the Memoria’s compilers, and, thus, that this tradition was also popular in different circles around the island. Taking Fara’s account, which places the Iberian princess’s arrival in Sardinia in 1052, the King of Navarre who banished his daughter would be Garcí�a Sánchez III (1035–1054), nicknamed “el de Nájera,” and the event narrated in the Sardinian sources would have happened over forty years, during which time the then County of Aragon would have been separate from the Kingdom of Navarre. Indeed, that fusion took place between 1000 and 1035 and between 1076 and 1134. The attempt to link the Giudicato dynasty of Arborea to the royal one of Navarre from such an early period—the mid-eleventh century—when the kingdom of Aragon did not even exist, was real political “discourse” aiming to grant the Sardinian rulers a royal status even more ancient than that of the Aragonese kings themselves. Furthermore, the kingship of these judges in this way would have originated with the Navarre dynasty, which held what was then the County of Aragon.36 It should be noted that the Memoria does not explicitly mention the union between the Princess and the eleventh-century Giudici of Arborea, but it reports that for some time she “lived in the island of Sardinia,”37 always near Sinis: milagrosament aportaron, con mal tiempo, en Cerdeña en una parte llamada Ollastre. […] Después diez o doze dí�as passados, […] lo primero que hizieron et hordenaron fue una iglesia, et pusieronle nombre Sancta Maria de Nabarra. […] Después […] viendo, a cabo de poco tiempo. la tierra no era tan buena como ellos quisieran acuerdan todos, o los más d’ellos, de se ir de allí�. Et fuéronse la ví�a de Arborea encontrada de Sancto Marco de Sinis, e allí� asentaron su est[o]l y comenzaron a abitar con mayor repos, porque hallavan ya muchas abitaciones fechas del tiempo de los moros, así� villas como casas fuertes.” Cited from Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, 4–6. 35  “Altero deinde anno 1052 regis Navarrae filia, inscio patre rapta, exilio et tempestate in Sardiniam acta, sedes cum sociis collocavit suas in regione Ogugliastri, ubi S.tae Mariae Navarresae templum ab ea conditum cernitur easque ob malignitate loci mutare coacta, in Arborensem regionem encontratae S.ti Marci de Sinis dictae secessit et oppidum a Sarracenis desertum incoluit.” Cited from Farae, “De Rebus Sardois,” 248 (book 2, tome 2). 36  This could be the answer to Maninchedda’s question (Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, xii): “perché, in questo piccolo progetto propagandistico, si volle scegliere la Navarra come luogo d’origine degli Arborea e non la Provenza, o l’Anjou, o il Monferrato?” Among other things, the operation set up by the creators of this tradition seems anything but a “piccolo progetto propagandistico.” 37  “abitava en la isla de Cerdeña.” Cited from Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, 6.

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And they went to Arborea in the region of San Marco del Sinis and established their group and began to live in greater rest, because they found many houses built in the age of the Moors, as well as villas and fortified buildings.38

This suggests, implicitly, a dynastic connection with the Giudici of Arborea, who in this way would have acquired royal blood.39 With such narratives, the chroniclers were performing what we discussed earlier about myth: that is, they were remembering and then re-enacting an origin story and and the social and identitarian status of the Giudicato dynasty. Hence my insistence on attention to every single word in the sources, their use and meaning, latent or concealed.40 The intention of the Memoria’s authors to establish a connection between the royal dynasty of Navarre and that of the Arborea’s Giudice was important for the legal claims of the Sardinian rulers and for their political and cultural awareness of their own institutional standing in the fourteenth century. This objective seems confirmed by the period given for the Princess of Navarre’s supposed arrival in the territory of Arborea: the mideleventh century.41 This was a crucial moment in the history of Sardinia, and of Arborea particularly, for several reasons. First, this arrival would have almost coincided with the abandonment of the ancient Byzantine city of Tharros, capital of the Giudicato, in favour of Oristano, the new political centre of the Sardinian polity, in 1070 (according to Fara, that is); it was almost as if they wanted to express symbolically a new birth of the Giudicato (a re-foundation in the anthropo­logical sense of the word) through incorporating new royal blood from Navarre—as if this event ushered in a completely new story. Secondly, but no less important, the princess’s arrival would have occurred when the

38  “Et fuéronse la ví�a de Arborea encontrada de Sancto Marco de Sinis, e allí� asentaron su est[o]l y comenzaron a abitar con mayor repos, porque hallavan ya muchas abitaciones fechas del tiempo de los moros, así� villas como casas Fuertes.” Cited from Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, 6.

39  Maninchedda suggests that the legendary connection between Navarre and Arborea developed between the celebration of the marriage of Giudice Barisone I of Arborea and Agalbors (which in the mid-twelfth century joined the Sardinian family of Lacon–Serra and the Catalan one of Bas–Cervera) and the beginning of the war against the Aragonese in 1364 (Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, xlvi–xlviii). 40  We would also recommend a Foucaultian “archaeo­logical” reading of the Memoria, to trace a story of the same discourses made, consciously or not, by the protagonists of the events examined, as practices obeying precise rules. See Michel Foucault, L’archéo­logie du savoir (Paris, 1969), 181–82.

41  The idea of an awareness of his own role and that of his dynasty emerges from Marianus IV’s response to Bernat de Cabrera, who had indignantly refused the invitation of the Giudice to meet and discuss the Sardinian situation in Bosa, in response to the governor’s convocation in Alghero, after the defeat of the Genoese fleet, to clear himself of some of the allegations hanging over him. The Giudice’s statement reveals the opinion he had of himself and his family, making a clear allusion to his father Hugh II and to the vassal homage he paid to the dauphin Alfonso: “And never was the House of Arborea in the habit of going to anyone coming here [in Sardinia] if not the son of a king and moreover the firstborn” (E jamés la Casa d’Arborea no ha acustumat anar a nengú qu.ich uenga sino a fill de rey et encara primogenit, en que més que nós ho cuidavem haver fet per plaer-li fer et convidar en ço del nostre). From Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancilleria, Procesos contra los Arborea, III, fol. 35v. These statements by Marianus IV can be read using the theories of Veyne (Comment on écrit l’histoire, 366), who shows that the level of tasks a person assigns to himself or the breadth of his ambition depend upon his idea of himself.



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Giudice of Arborea (like the other three Sardinian rulers) would have been enjoying its greatest autonomy, under the Western world’s highest political authority: the Roman Church. Indeed, a few decades after the supposed arrival, all four Sardinian judges would be forced to accept increasing interference by Pope Gregory VII and to align themselves with the ecclesiastical reform he was instigating. Gregory had gained more confidence by the defeat of the Byzantine Empire in Mantzikert at the hands of the Seljuk Turks in 1071 and the conquest in the same year of the Byzantine city of Bari by Robert Guiscard, who was expanding Norman dominion in the Italian peninsula. It seems no coincidence that on October 14, 1073, only two years after events that altered profoundly the Byzantine presence in Italy, Gregory VII turned to the four Sardinia rulers, or iudices, to tie them more closely to the Holy See, issuing the first document attesting the simultaneous presence of “Marianus of Torres, Onrocus of Arborea, Orrocus of Calari, and Constantin of Gallura, judges of Sardinia.”42 From that time onwards, Sardinian rulers would have to deal with the Roman Pontiff, whose political action would become increasingly intrusive. The forced acceptance of the Gregorian reform had long-lasting effects not only on the legal status of judges, but also on the ecclesiastical structure of the Provincia Sardiniae, with its division into two ecclesiastical provinces created perhaps in 1075 by the energetic Pope.43 But such a step required a stable politico-institutional context such as the one provided by the four Giudicati, which had emerged from the disappearance of the ancient Byzantine Iudicatus Sardiniae after the brief conquest of parts of the island by Mujahid in 1015–1016.44 That said, if we consider that the composition of the Memoria was begun by the mid-fourteenth century, when the Giudici of Arborea were standing up against the King of Aragon, we may infer that the reference to the connection with the royal dynasty of Navarre was also a challenge to the Apostolic See. First, Marianus IV, and then his son Hugh III would be asking for the enfeoffment of the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae in lieu of the Aragonese kings. By this legendary tale, the Giudici may have sent two messages in one: the first was that their dynasty too could boast of royal blood, like the House of the Counts–Kings of Barcelona, which would have made easier (purely theoretically) the replacement of the 42  “Mariano turrensi, Onroco arborensi, Orroco caralitano et Constantino gallurensi iudicibus Sardiniae.” Cited from Gregorius Magnus, “Registrum epistularum. Epistulae,” ed. Dag Norberg, in Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 2 vols. (Turnhout, 1982), 1:46.

43  When, at the beginning of the eleventh century, the contacts between the island, the Apostolic See, and the Republics of Genoa and Pisa intensified (they being used to obtain the expulsion of Mujahid from Sardinia), the island must have experienced a kind of cultural “revolution,” small but deep, leading from a sphere of clear institutional, legal, and cultural Greek origins—albeit adapted to local needs through a degree of autonomy—to one of Latin and Western origin, with all the consequences this entailed. We have analyzed this delicate moment of transition in Luciano Gallinari, “Il Giudicato di Calari tra xi e xiii secolo. Proposte di interpretazioni istituzionali,” RiMe. Rivista dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea 5 (2010): 147–87 at 155–56. 44  Corrado Zedda and Raimondo Pinna, La carta del giudice cagliaritano Orzocco Torchitorio, prova dell’attuazione del progetto gregoriano di riorganizzazione della giurisdizione ecclesiastica della Sardegna (Sassari, 2009), 50–51.

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Aragonese King with the Giudici of Arborea, as the latter had at least twice requested; the second message, however, may have been the emphasis by the Sardinian rulers on their loyalty to Rome since the time of Gregory VII and the acceptance of his reform, a loyalty that continued through the Great Schism. In 1378 Giudice Hugh III obtained his investiture from Pope Urban VI, someone very hostile to the King of Aragon since the beginning of his pontificate.45 The Schism placed the sovereigns of Aragon and the judges of Arborea on opposite sides. The Aragonese held a neutral position (indiferencia) until Peter the Ceremonious’s death (1387) and then, during the reign of the new King John I, became open supporters of Pope Clement VII. By contrast, the Sardinian rulers always kept faithful to the Roman pope until the end of the Schism in 1414, stoking conflict between the two contenders for the possession of Sardinia. This is another factor behind the “discourse” in favour of the Apostolic Roman See produced by the Memoria’s authors.46 The intention to rewrite the history of the Giudicato of Arborea shown by the Memoria’s authors (or the authors of documents consulted by them and whose content was included in their chronicle) emerges not only from the link they probably created between the Princess of Navarre tradition and the mid-eleventh century judges, as discussed above, but also appears in the emphasis on this connection elsewhere in their historical account, with over a century gap in between. Reference to the Arborea–Navarre connection by the authors of the Memoria spanned the history of Sardinia from the mideleventh century to the thirteenth century. That is to say, from the princess’s arrival in the island to the destruction of the Giudicato of Calari’s capital in 1257 at the hand of Pisans.47

45  This news was reported by Jerónimo Zurita, Anales de la Corona de Aragón, ed. Angel Canellas López, 8 vols. (Zaragoza, 1978), 4:655 (book 10, chap. 23): “Urban VI […], given his harsh and excessively rigorous disposition, publicly said that the King of Aragon had been deprived of the kingdom of Sardinia and that he would announce this, and that he would nominate King of Sardinia the Giudice of Arborea” (Urbano VI […] como era de su condición áspero y demasiadamente riguroso, dijo públicamente que el rey de Aragón habí�a sido privado del reino de Cerdeña y que él le mandarí�a denunciar como a tal, y que harí�a rey de Cerdeña al juez de Arborea).

46  Since his ascension to the throne, John immediately took a stand in favour of the antipope, partly due to pressure from his wife Violante de Bar, who he married thanks to the offices of Clement VII and the assistance of Cardinal Pere de Luna, the future Pope Benedict XIII, and Vicent Ferrer, Violante of Bar’s confessor. The new monarch summoned a council of theo­logians in Barcelona that were to pronounce on which pontiff the Catalan–Aragonese clergy should honour. The assembly concluded its work on February 4, 1387, siding in favour of the antipope Clement VII. On the Western Schism and its influence on the policy of the Aragonese Crown, see Henri Bresc, “La Maison d’Aragon et le Schisme: implications de politique internationale,” in Jornades sobre el Cisma d’Occident a Catalunya, les Illes i el Pais Valencià, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1986), 1:37–53 at 37–39; Carmen Batlle i Gallart, “La ciutat de Barcelona i el Cisma,” in Jornades sobre el Cisma d’Occident a Catalunya, les Illes i el Pais Valencià, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1986), 2:315–26; Rafael Tasis, Joan I el rey caçador i músic (Barcelona, 1959), 143. For more details on the effects of the Schism in Sardinia see Raimondo Turtas, Storia della Chiesa dalle origini al Duemila (Rome, 1999), 310–13. 47  Maninchedda (Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, xxii) argues that the sources for the three episodes that allude to the Arborea–Navarre connection (that is, the foundation of the church of S. Maria Navarrese; the destruction of the city of S. Igia, the capital of the Giudicato of Calari; and the marriage of Giudice don Nicolao and a close relative of the king of Aragon) are mainly oral,



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These considerations also cast light on the level of knowledge about this history the authors of the Memoria (or of the sources they consulted) had. Their alteration of events pertaining to the Arborea Giudicato family implies a familiarity with key events and periods in secular history that enabled them to choose wisely how and where to intervene. This knowledge is an indirect benefit to scholars of the history of Sardinia in offering us a deeper understanding of popular sentiment and belief in each giudicato, and in particular Arborea. During the fourteenth century, others, probably belonging to the Giudicato of Arborea, wanted to rewrite parts of this Sardinian political history, reaffirming once again the close connection with Navarre and, in one case, reshaping the origin of the relationship between the kings of Aragon and the Giudici. Here we find a reference to the family union wished by the rulers of Barcelona due to the high status of the judges and “since they descended from those nobles and the Infanta of Navarre.”48 Besides several inaccuracies in the Memoria’s account, it should be noted that the authors of the anonymous chronicle amplified the actual extent of the relationship between the Giudici of Arborea and the Kings of Barcelona, probably with the aim of increasing their prestige and reaffirming their royal origin not only via the lineage from the Princess of Navarre, but also through a close connection with the monarchs of Aragon.49 But this was a fictio elaborated by the authors of the Memoria (or those who produced the documents they consulted), whose normative character assumed a constitutive role once formulated.50 Inaccuracies notwithstanding, perhaps it was not a coincidence that even the choice of the year 1127 (even if wrong) indicated the date of the family connection between the judges of Arborea and the Aragonese kings by proponents of the mid-eleventh century Navarre–Arborea link, since this period appears in the sources as a moment of confusion within the succession of the rulers of Arborea. Indeed, this may have offered the opportunity to insert the so-called “don Nicolao” into the Giudicato genealogy.51 characterized by chrono­logical vagueness, imprecision in the names of places and people, and a legendary tone.

48  “Por deçendir de aquellos nobles y señora de Infanta de Nabarra.” Cited from Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda, 10.

49  Elsewhere I have argued that this wedding was celebrated in 1127 between a Giudice of Arborea, named don Nicolao (Memoria de las cosas, ed. Maninchedda), and “a very close relative of his [the king of Aragon] that the Queen had as a mistress” (una su parienta muy cercana que la señora reina tení�a por camarera). We highlighted that the altered version of this event in the anonymous chronicle contained several inaccuracies, including the date and the name of the alleged judge. In addition, the general tone of the account of this episode seems slightly naive, almost folkloric, when they speak of Giudice don Nicolao who, at some unspecified date, while he was engaged in a kind of ante litteram journey by sea, would have been captured by “a boat of Catalans” (una fusta de cathalanes) and taken to Catalonia. 50  Ugo Fabietti, L’identità etnica. Storia e criticadi un concetto equivoco (Rome, 1995), 63.

51  Lindsay L. Brook et al., eds., Genealogie medioevali di Sardegna (Cagliari,1984), 163–67; Raimondo Turtas, “I giudici sardi del secolo xi: da Giovanni Francesco Fara aDionigi Scano,” Studi Sardi 33 (2000): 211–75 at 264–68.

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If our survey is right, this should inspire further consideration of the level of knowledge about the Giudicato and Sardinia’s history before the fourteenth century, and on what documentary and literary basis it has been based. Another reason to lament losses to Sardinian archives and libraries, sources that would help fill important gaps in the island’s medi­eval past. But this is why greater attention is worth directing to the documents produced in the Giudicato chanceries.52

Conclusions

The few examples briefly presented here show the potential for an interdisciplinary analysis of a crucial period in Sardinian medi­eval history using techniques from the social sciences, offering a more nuanced vision and interpretations of both events and their protagonists. At the same time, the analysis of the Memoria and De rebus sardois offers further details on this attempt at developing a “discourse,” in particular by the authors of the Memoria, to strengthen—it may have been already in place but of that we cannot be certain—an ethnic identity of the Arborea Giudicato dynasty and the Giudicato itself.53 This process considered the institutional opposition, and sometimes even a military one, between the other three Giudicati in Sardinia and their respective rulers between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and also, of course, the political and institutional circumstances of the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae, which were initially peaceful but then involved in military conflict for more than half a century. Given the wealth of material for Sardinian medi­eval history offered by the Memoria, it is unfortunate we have no other similar sources on the Giudicato society and its rulers from the interior of the island. And, in the case of the Giudici of Arborea, it would be useful to have more arguments from those rulers to deal with the Kings of Aragon and to obtain from the Holy See the title of King of Sardinia. It was a title their dynasty had pursued since the mid-eleventh century, eventually obtaining it; not from the pope, however, but from Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. 52  Maurice Le Lannou, “Un’idea della Sardegna,” in La Sardegna, ed. Manlio Brigaglia, 2 vols. (Cagliari, 1982), 1:6, argues that today we have no documentary sources on the history of the island because Sardinian institutions did not encourage an appropriate archival attitude: “l’archivio ha sfuggito un’isola abbandonata o dominata, e bisogna cercare a Barcellona, a Madrid, a Pisa, a Marsiglia le tracce scritte che costituiscono la materia prima più utile allo storico.” These statements are contradicted by available records on the documents’ registration in the Chancery of Arborea, at least from the second half of the thirteenth century, and by the provisions found in the Carta de Logu of Arborea, the most important legal text of the Giudicato administration, issued by the iudicissa Eleonora around 1392. See Francesco Cesare Casula, Dizionario Storico Sardo (Sassari, 2001), 348–52.

53  An historical memory, at least partial, of the history of both dynasty and Giudicato based upon public documents, issued by the Giudicato scribania, copies of which were conserved from at least the second half of the thirteenth century, as noted above. But perhaps an historical memory based also on the existence of other narrative and oral sources (such as the legend of the founding of Santa Maria Navarrese) and on Giudice Barisone I of Arborea’s designation as King of Sardinia in 1164.

Chapter 8

MEMORY OF THE STATE OR MEMORY OF THE KINGDOM? A COMPARATIVE APPROACH TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND JEAN-PHILIPPE GENET

The notion of

memory is inseparable from its vectors. Memory is an individual experience evoking the workings of the subject’s psycho­logy and intellect,1 but it is powered by products of society: specific knowledge and signs and collective or individual experiences dependent on the media making individuals aware of them. We are going to investigate in this comparative research only a part of this, the part concerning the national community or rather, to guard ourselves against any kind of teleo­logical anachronism, political society. There are very many media involved, of course, but one stands out from all the others and that is language, whether spoken or written, either because of the deep structures it reveals or the specific connotations it presents. Not that language is, a priori, the carrier of a national identity: here, too, we must beware of anachronisms. But our sources allow us to know the intended recipient of a written message and therefore have an idea of the strategy of the person giving it, although on the other hand it gives us only indirect knowledge of the recipient of the message itself and the reactions to it. However, the problem of languages introduces a very important difference between France and England and, in turn, affects the historio­graphy of these two kingdoms through which we will try to follow the emergence and structuring of national histories and memories. Naturally, neither language, whether written or spoken, nor history, are the only vectors through which national memory is constructed, but they play an important role in it. Language is, above all, important as a strong indicator of the existence of a socially diverse readership. Until the end of the Middle Ages, Latin remained the language of the clergy, although it was known and used by a growing number of lay people, notably those who had learned and practised law, but the writing and large-scale circulation of works in the vernacular implies that an increasingly large audience was available 1  Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medi­eval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cam­ bridge, 2005); and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medi­eval Culture (Cam­bridge, 1990) presenting two different approaches to the role of memory and the processes of recall; but for the problem of national memories, it is essential to start with the work of Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. 1, La République (Paris, 1984).

Jean-Philippe Genet ([email protected]) is Emeritus Professor of Medi­eval History at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France.

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to read them. From this point of view, a difference must be made between poetic and prose works. The former can eventually be considered as evidence of literature whose circulation was oral rather than written. It is therefore necessary to begin with a very rapid overview of the linguistic conditions of historio­graphical production in the two kingdoms.

Language and History in France and England

The more complicated case, at least on the face of it, is that of England. For France, at first sight, things seem simple: from the end of the thirteenth century, Parisian French is thought to have become established as the “language of the king”—in other words that of his officers and his chancery—thereby becoming the national vernacular.2 However, this did not prevent “other French languages” from surviving and sometimes playing a very important role. This was the case with Picard,3 or “English French,” which is generally but misleadingly called Anglo-Norman.4 Moreover, in France there was another vernacular, the Langue d’Oc or Provençal. In fact, the royal chancery, as has been shown in Hong Jun Yong’s remarkable doctoral thesis,5 skilfully played with these different languages, including the Langue d’Oc, with marked variations depending on the reign, according to whether the audience involved was lay or ecclesiastical, urban or noble and, of course, depending on the region. Concerning the writing of historical works, and writing in general, the use of French appears much earlier in England, with Wace’s work (the Roman de Brut, a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the Roman de Rou)6 and that of his rival and successor Benoî�t de Sainte-Maure (the Histoire des ducs de Normandie) 2  R. Anthony Lodge, A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French (Cam­bridge, 2004); and R. Anthony Lodge, “Sociolinguistique historique et histoire de la langue française,” in Langue et Histoire, ed. Jean-Marie Bertrand, Pierre Boilley, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Pauline Schmitt-Pantel (Paris, 2011), 79–90; Serge Lusignan, La langue des rois au Moyen Âge. Le français en France et en Angleterre (Paris, 2004), 9–44.

3  Serge Lusignan, “Histoire et sociolinguistique: le français picard et les administrations publiques du nord-ouest de l’Europe,” in Langue et Histoire, ed. Jean-Marie Bertrand, Pierre Boilley, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Pauline Schmitt-Pantel (Paris, 2011), 91–102; and Serge Lusignan, Essai d’histoire socio-linguistique. Le français picard au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2012).

4  Jean-Philippe Genet, La Genèse de l’État moderne. Culture et société politique en Angleterre (Paris, 2003), 139–68; and Jean-Philippe Genet, “L’anglo-normand entre féodal et politique: le vocabulaire du pouvoir,” in IIe journées anglo-normandes: approches techniques, littéraires et historiques, ed. André Crépin and Jean Leclant (Paris, 2012), 9–34; Lusignan, La langue du roi, 155–218.

5  Yong-Jin Hong, Le roi et la société politique: la monarchie française et le système de communication, 1315–1360 (PhD diss., University Paris 1, 2010). See now Yong-Jin Hong, “Langue et politique à la cour de Philippe VI et de Jean II,” in Traduction et culture. France – Îles britanniques, ed. JeanPhilippe Genet (Paris, 2018), 49–87. 6  In order not to add to the notes of this article, I shall refer, with exceptions, to the articles by Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink, eds., Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises. Le Moyen Âge (Paris, 1992), 1498–500 (on Wace by G. Tyl-Labory); and 139–41 (on Benoî�t, by L.-F. Flutre and F



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written for the court of Henry II. However, the circulation of these works remained limited as did that of Layamon’s Brut,7 the English adaptation of Wace. This latter work was, however, a commission from a member of the provincial aristocracy, like Estoire des Engleis by Geoffrey Gaimar, which offers good evidence that there was already an embryonic audience for national history following the impact made by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum (about which we will talk again later). All the Latin versions of this work survive in more than two hundred manu­scripts.8 Although we cannot go as far as to call this a flash in the pan, the use of the two vernaculars in England was nevertheless initially quite limited, while for France, Isabelle Guyot-Bachy, in her unfortunately still unpublished work which she has incorporated into her professorial thesis,9 gives some quite striking statistics for French production. In fact, she indicates that one-fifth of thirteenth-century texts were written in the vernacular (French and Langue d’Oc together) and this proportion rose to seventy percent for the period 1302–1382, the vernacular being then almost exclusively in French. For England, I have obtained parallel figures from my own files, although the statistics are not strictly comparable, as they are concerned with authors rather than works.10 The orders of magnitude are: forty authors of at least one work that can be considered historical for each quarter of a century from 1301 to 1375; fifty-two for the period 1376–1400, and just over sixty for the period 1526–1550 with, however, a dramatic fall for the period 1476–1500, corresponding to the bloody end of the Wars of the Roses and the establishment of the Tudor monarchy. The number of Latin authors reached its peak in 1401–1450, a period when the authorities looked on the English language with suspicion because the banned Lollard heresy was spread in that language. This level was maintained until the end of the century, when it was overtaken by English. As for vernaculars, French, English, (but also from the fifteenth century onwards the Celtic languages) Welsh, and Gaelic, the number of authors writing in English remained very low until 1375. Then the true vernacular of the English elites was French and there were twice as many authors writing in that language. But if we add together the authors writing in the two languages, they represent barely one-fifth of the authors writing in Latin, Mora). See the English translation by Judith Weiss, Roman de Brut. A History of the British: Text and Translation (Exeter, 1999). 7  Marie-Françoise Alamichel, De Wace à Layamon (Paris, 1995).

8  The History of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De Gestis Britonum, ed. Michael D. Reeves, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007); Neil Wright, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I. Bern Burger Bibliothek 568 (Cam­bridge, 1985); and Neil Wright, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, II. The First Variant Version (Cam­bridge, 1988); Julia C. Crick, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, III. A Summary Catalogue of the Manu­scripts (Woodbridge, 1989); and Julia C. Crick, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, IV. Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Cam­bridge, 1991).

9  Isabelle Guyot-Bachy, Écriture de l’histoire et représentation du passé dans la France médiévale (Paris, 2010). Only part of this fundamental work has been published: La Flandre et les Flamands au miroir des historiens du royaume: xe–xve siècle (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2017).

10  Genet, La Genèse de l’État moderne. The database of English authors is available online, accessed January 3, 2019, http://lamop-intranet.univ-paris1.fr/auteurs_anglais/.

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Table 1: The languages of English historian authors. No. of authors

Writing in Latin

Writing in English

Writing in French

1301–1325

41

36

2

9

1351–1375

41

35

3

4

Period*

1326–1350 1376–1400 1401–1425 1426–1450 1451–1475 1476–1500 1501–1525 1526–1550

41 52 66 64 62 43 63

157

30

4

41

10

51

12

53 44 22 29

54

12 18 16 32

100

7 6 3 4 2 3 5

19

* The authors are assigned to each period according to their median date of activity. The exact dates of birth and even death are often unknown.

a ratio between Latin and the vernacular that is exactly the reverse of the situation in France in the fourteenth century! From 1376 to 1400, the number of authors writing in English trebled but then stagnated, probably for the reason indicated above, as the mere possession of a book in English was enough to make a person suspect in the eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities.11 It then increased again very quickly, but only from 1500 onwards. So, from 1526 to 1550, more than two-thirds of authors were writing in the vernacular, but it can clearly be seen that the position of the vernacular was secured late compared to France. In any case, we must bear in mind this strong dissymmetry of language use and socio-cultural distribution underlying it as we approach the two historio­graphies. I will begin with the one most familiar to me: that of England.

11  Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), 166–68 and 186–88. She mentions in particular an inquiry which took place during the reign of Henry IV in Colchester and for which all the English books found in the city were confiscated before being returned to their respective owners after examination by the Prior of Saint Bartholomew in London, acting on instructions from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel (Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 186).



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English Historio­graphical Production12

All observers have been struck by the quality and abundance of English and Norman production in the twelfth century, but also in the thirteenth.13 Great monastic historians, such as William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis, and later Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, as well as secular ones such as Henry of Huntingdon, are at least as good as and sometimes better than the best European historians. Their role above all consisted of shedding light on the question of Anglia: that England profoundly disrupted by three successive conquests that deeply transformed it by adding to its ethnic, social, and cultural roots: the Roman conquest, the Germanic conquest, and the Norman conquest, not to mention the temporary Viking and Scandinavian conquest. John Gillingham14 and Sir Rees Davies15 shed a great deal of light on the construction of this English identity in which history played an essential role. The works of these great twelfth-century historians were present in all monastic libraries of the end of the Middle Ages and even afterwards, because the manu­scripts containing their works were carefully collected immediately after the dissolution of the monasteries by experts during the Tudor period—John Leland, John Bale, Mathew Parker, and their agents. But what is most striking in England is the fact that there was no real official historio­graphy. Two Benedictine monasteries, Westminster and St. Albans, disputed this role: the former was clearly close to royal power and the second was in a place visited by all the key players, the first stop on the Great North Road running from London to the Scottish border. The two monasteries would produce important works, notably the Flores Historiarum at Westminster and a whole succession of historio­graphies would produce the best-informed and best-written chronicles of their time. St. Albans finally

12  As a general rule, reference should be made to the two volumes by Antonia Gransden, Histo­ rical Writing in England to 1307 (London, 1974); and her Historical Writing in England from 1307 to 1509 (London, 1984). They constitute the unavoidable and monumental introduction to the English historio­graphy. See also, for the period under consideration in this para­graph, Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington, DC, 1997).

13  Starting with Sir Richard W. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 4. The Sense of the Past,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 23 (1973): 243–63; see also Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 1980), 309–10. 14  John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000).

15  Rees Davies, “In Praise of British History,” in The British Isles 1100–1500, Comparisons, Con­trasts and Connections, ed. Rees Davies (Edinburgh, 1988), 9–26; Rees Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100–1300 (Cam­bridge, 1990) (The Wiles Lectures given at the Queen’s Uni­ver­sity at Belfast, 1988); the talks to the Royal Historical Society: Rees Davies, “The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4 (1994): 1–20 (“I. Identities”); 5 (1995): 1–20 (“II. Names, Boundaries and Regnal Solidarities”); 6 (1996): 1–23 (“III. Laws and Customs”); and 7 (1997): 1–24 (“IV. Language and Historical Mytho­ logy”); Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England (Oxford, 1996); Rees Davies, The First English Empire. Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000) (The Ford Lectures Delivered in the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford in Hilary Term 1998); Rees Davies, Heartlands and Outbacks: The Medi­eval English Empire (Oxford, 2000).

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came out on top. From Matthew Paris to Thomas Walsingham, it produced a host of histories all remarkable in one way or another. However, the status of these chroniclers was not comparable to that of their counterparts in Saint-Denis. This is sufficiently demonstrated by the way Thomas Walsingham expressed his critical view of the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV.16 Moreover, the kings of England knew the value of these texts and went to the Benedictines whenever they needed historical information, such as when Edward I wanted to demonstrate his suzerainty over Scotland.17 Moreover, the Benedictines would, with Ranulph Higden in Chester,18 produce a world chronicle that enjoyed great success (no fewer than thirty manu­scripts of it survive in Latin and twenty-two in English). After being translated into English by John of Trevisa, it would continue to be printed until 1527.19 But the great change of direction began earlier, undoubtedly close to the court or, more precisely, circles involved in the competition between the houses of Blois and Anjou for the succession to the Crown at the end of the reign of Henry I and during the interregnum. This is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,20 which we have already mentioned. Its stroke of genius is having prepared the mental ground for the integration of Anglo-Saxon and Norman history in the same story by resurrecting a “British” history through a long, complex, and largely fictional narrative (even if he claimed to have also used Welsh sources) going back to the eponymous Trojan hero, Brutus. It also has the tremendous merit of showing that the Anglo-Saxons were also invaders, so the establishment of the Normans appears as a practically normal development in English history. Although he ended his history in the seventh century, he created a fictional continuity, a dreamed history rooted in the legendary history of Britain. Difficult to classify, and more a work of literature than a historical work—fiction rather than history—his work was a Europe-wide success in its different Latin or French versions. While it soon branched into an abundant literary genre, for us it is above all the origin of an extremely rich branch of national historical writing, the Bruts, which begin with the arrival of Brutus on the Isle of Albion. In this field of national history, they form the largest family of texts in the common language (French, then English), although there 16  Vivian H. Galbraith, The St. Albans Chronicle 1406–1420 (Oxford, 1937); and James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St. Albans (Oxford, 2004).

17  Bernard Guenée, “L’enquête historique ordonnée par É� douard Ier, roi d’Angleterre, en 1291,” Compte rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 119 (1975): 572–84, reprinted in Bernard Guenée, Politique et histoire au Moyen Âge. Recueil d’articles sur l’histoire politique et l’historio­graphie médiévale (Paris, 1981), 239–52. 18  The edition by Churchill Babington and Joseph R. Lumby, eds., Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis (London, 1865–1886), was digitized with the English version of John of Trevisa as part of the project “Signs and States” (SAS) financed by the European Research Council (http://palm.huma-num.fr/PALM/). See also Ronald Waldron, ed., John Trevisa’s Translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden (Heidelberg, 2004). 19  John Taylor, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford, 1966).

20  Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 201–9; see also John S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and its Early Vernacular Versions (Berkeley, 1950); and Roger S. Loomis, Wales and the Arthurian Legends (Cardiff, 1958).



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are just as many Latin versions.21 At the socio-cultural level, the essential point is that these different versions, on which Julia Crick22 at Exeter is doing exemplary work, speak to very diverse social groups, from clerical scholars, including Geoffrey, to the lay circles they needed. The popular appeal of Merlin’s Prophéties is not exhausted even today. A stirring towards the vernacular is undoubtedly perceptible at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the Chronique by Peter Langtoft, an Augustinian canon who died in 1307 and who wrote his chronicle mostly in French verse, was published by Jean-Claude Thiolier. It began, as it had to, with the arrival of Brutus.23 It was translated into English by another canon, this time a Gilbertine, Robert Mannyng of Brunne:24 but while there are twenty-seven manu­scripts of the French version, there are only four of the English one. This translation was preceded by Robert of Gloucester’s verse chronicle, a composite text whose authorship is extremely hypothetical, but of which about fifteen manu­scripts survive.25 The royal authorities seem to have been aware of this development and it was precisely in this period when we find a chronicle in French which they sponsored—the Croniques a Dame Marie—of which eleven manu­scripts have survived.26 It was the work of a Dominican, Nicolas Trevet, a great scholar well known throughout Europe (ninety-eight manu­scripts survive of his commentary on the Declamationes by Seneca and fifty-three manu­scripts of his commentary on De Consolatione philosophie by Boethius). For him, history seems to have been only a secondary vocation: his world chronicle is a typically Dominican chronicle strongly inspired by that of Vincent de Beauvais (see below) and, although twenty-two manu­scripts of his Annales Sex Regum survive, indicating a degree of success, the work, which was always favourable to royal policy, did not manage to establish itself as a model national history.27 We should add 21  Friedrich D. Brie, Geschichte und Quellen der mittelenglischen Prosachronik “The Brute of England” (Marburg, 1905); and Lister M. Matheson, The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe, 1998).

22  See Crick, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, III; and Crick, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, IV.

23  Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 476–86; Jean-Claude Thiolier, Critical and Commented Edition by Pierre de Langtoft. Le règne d’Édouard Ier (Créteil, 1989). There is also an abbreviated French Brut from a little later (around 1310?), that of Ralph de Bohun: Rauf de Boun. Le petit Bruit, ed. Diana B. Tyson (London, 1987).

24  Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., The Sory of England, by Robert Manning of Brunne (London, 1887); see notably Rhonda Knight, “Stealing Stonehenge: Translation, Appropriation and Cultural Identity in Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Chronicle,” Journal of Medi­eval and Early Modern Studies, 32 (2002): 41–58. 25  Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 432–38.

26  “Here the chronicle did by Nicolas Trevet to Lady Mary, son of our Lord King Edward, son of Henry, starts (The deeds of the Apostles, Emperors and Kings)” (Cy commenca les cronycles ke frer Nichole Tryvetis escrit a dame Marie la fille mounsygnar le roy Edward le fiz Henry [Les gestes des Apostoiles, Empereurs e Rois]). Cited from Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 503–4. It is dedicated to Mary, daughter of King Edward I, nun at Amesbury who died in 1332, while the chronicle was completed only in 1334. 27  Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 504–7; Thomas Hog, ed., Nicholai Triveti Annales (London, 1845).

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that, together with his Dominican colleague Thomas Waleys, he was also the author of the standard commentary on Augustine’s De Civitate Dei.28 What did in fact become established as what we might call English history “textbooks” were works belonging to two strands of anonymous texts. The first group was based precisely on Geoffrey and used the chrono­logical and ethno-political framework he provided: these are the Bruts, which trace a continuous history of England from the arrival of Prince Brutus and his companions (Brutus having been “chosen” by them), who seized the Isle of Albion from its first occupants, the giants. The narrative then continues until the end of Edward I’s reign and follows on from reign to reign. The Brut, which recounts English history to 1333, was initially in French,29 in two different versions,30 but would soon be rewritten in Latin and then in English. However—and this is important from the point of view of a comparison with the French case—unlike Nicolas Trevet’s Annales, the Brut was not favourable to royal policy, far from it: its heroes were Thomas Becket and Thomas of Lancaster, who was executed after Boroughbridge on the orders of Edward II. The English version was continued until 1377 and one hundred and twenty manu­scripts of it survive.31 That means there are three families of parallel texts which were all recopied with their own continuations, forming a real mosaic of texts. Some of these elements are common and interchangeable with those of the other family, the Chronicles of London.32 The city certainly had a historical tradition going back to Arnold Fitz Thedmar, the probable author of the Cronica Maiorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum and other texts contained in the Liber de Antiquis Legibus of the City,33 and Andrew Horn, probable author of the Annales Londinenses.34 To begin with, there was just a list of the mayors and sheriffs of the city year by year associated with St. Paul’s 28  Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), 58–65; Ruth J. Dean, “Nicholas Trevet, Historian,” in Medi­eval Learning and Literature, Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. Jonathan J. G. Alexander and Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1976), 328–52. 29  There may, however, have been an earlier version, dating from the end of the thirteenth century: Brie, Geschichte und Quellen, 43–44.

30  For the first Brut, see M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford, 1963); for the Anglo-Norman chronicles in general, see John Spence, “Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles and Their Audiences,” English Manu­script Studies 1100–1700 14 (2008): 27–60. On the Brut until 1333, see Gransden, Historical Writing in England from 1307 to 1509, 73–77. 31  Friedrich W. D. Brie, ed., The Brut or Chronicles of England (London, 1906–1908).

32  Gransden, Historical Writing in England from 1307 to 1509, 228–48, devotes a common chapter to the Bruts and the Chronicles of London. On the latter, see the overview in Mary-Rose McLaren, The London Chronicles of the Fifteenth Century. A Revolution in English Writing (Cam­bridge, 2002).

33  Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 508–17; Thomas Stapleton, ed., De Antiquis Legibus Liber: Cronica Maiorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum (London, 1846); see Gwyn A. Williams, Medi­ eval London: from Commune to Capital (London, 1963).

34  Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 508; see Jeremy Catto, “Andrew Horn, Law and History in Fourteenth-Century England,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. Ralph H. C. Davis and John M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981); and Williams, Medi­eval London, 268–70.



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cathedral in London, and all the chronicles normally began in 1189. The content of this simple chrono­logical table was gradually filled with increasingly detailed annals until it formed a continuous text, soon copied and appearing with various continuations. Although they were associated with the city, some of them are national in scope, and the Chronicles of London that continue until 1343 used as a base the short version of the Brut down to 1333.35 First available in French, like the Bruts, these chronicles then also appeared in Latin versions and finally in English. The text was also available at the Guildhall, where a whole series of documents useful to the merchant community concerning the life of the city were kept. One of the characteristics of these chronicles of London is that they included all kinds of documents. In certain cases, these were incorporated into real dossiers, as in the case of John Vale’s book, which was made into an exemplary edition,36 but they can also be written in a flowing manner, as in the case of the Great Chronicle of London.37 This shows so many similarities to the New Chronicles of England and France by Robert Fabyan,38 printed in 1516 by Richard Pynson—although it is true that all these chronicles are connected—that it used to be thought it was a first version of it. With Fabyan, we have the absolute opposite of the Benedictine monastic chroniclers with whom we began this overview: he was a London draper and merchant who became sheriff (1493) and alderman (1494). He transformed the Chronicles of London into national history and, as such, inserted them into world history, adapting Ranulph Higden’s chronicle in his first six books while only the seventh is a history of London. This raises the book to the rank of a history of England. It is a text that springs organically from political society, without the direct intervention of a monarchy which it very often criticizes, taking it up again only to glorify a vigorous nationalism.

French Historio­graphic Production39

It was in the mid-thirteenth century that French historio­graphic production took a new course, with the appearance of French as a language for writing history, although the proportion was still very low at the time when the Saint-Denis chroniclers began to use it. In itself, this was not altogether new: French was used from the beginning of the

35  Gransden, Historical Writing in England from 1307 to 1509, 71–73; George J. Aungier, ed., Croniques de London (London, 1844).

36  Margaret L. Kekewich, Colin Richmond, Anne F. Sutton, Livia Visser-Fuchs, John L. Watts, The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England. John Vale’s Book (Stroud, 1995). 37  Gransden, Historical Writing in England from 1307 to 1509, 231–32; Arthur H. Thomas, Isabel D. Thomley, eds., The Great Chronicle of London (London, 1938).

38  Gransden, Historical Writing in England from 1307 to 1509, 245–48; Henry Ellis, ed., New Chronicles of England and France in two parts by Robert Fabyan (London, 1811).

39  The classic reference work is Auguste Molinier, Les sources de l’histoire de France des origines aux guerres d’Italie (Paris, 1903), but the work is now outdated and must be corrected according to Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink. In the following, I am greatly indebted to Bernard Guenée, not only for Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, but also for all I could learn at his seminar, and above all to Guyot-Bachy, Écriture de l’histoire, the only recent synthesis to offer an overview.

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thirteenth century by chroniclers writing for members of the northern French nobility. However, it provides a tangible sign of a socio-cultural development demonstrating the existence of a potential audience for works written in this language. But, as Gabrielle Spiegel has shown very successfully,40 these were texts glorifying the ideals of these noblemen who, at the time, strongly opposed the progress of the Capetian monarchy in this region. Bereft following the division of the Merovingian realm, they were confronted by the ambitions of the Capetian dynasty in the reigns of Philip Augustus and Louis VIII. Some of the versions of the chronicle of the Pseudo-Turpin,41 the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César,42 the Fet des Romains,43 and the Roman de César44 form an ideo­ logical and historically significant group. Could this not be precisely because they turned their backs on any kind of national history ordered by the dynamic of royal successions? In any case, a history of the regnum Franciae could not possibly appear in these noble circles attached to the memory of the great feudal lineages; a history of a kingdom that had already lost the Catalan counties and where the situation was still quite fragile until the end of the twelfth century in the face of the Plantagenet threat and Breton and Flemish desires for autonomy or even secession. Negative proof of this is provided by the Chronique des Rois de France by Anonymous of Béthune, a minstrel in the service of Robert VII de Béthune, who illustrated above all the discomfort of the aristocratic nobility of northern France faced with the rapid progress of royal authority45 40  Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historio­graphy in ThirteenthCentury France (Berkeley, 1993).

41  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Pseudo-Turpin,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 292–95: the chronicle, which dates from the middle of the twelfth century and whose author claims to be the archbishop of Reims Turpin (whereas it seems to have been written at Saint-Denis: but the Latin text is more a propaganda text for the Pilgrimage of Compostela and for the Crusade in Spain than for the Capetian dynasty) first circulated in Latin (Historia Karoli Magni et Rotholandi) and tells of supposed campaigns undertaken by Charlemagne mainly in Spain against the Muslims at the request of Santiago de Compostela. If certain translations or adaptations have been made in the perspectives defined by Spiegel (Gabrielle Spiegel, “Pseudo Turpin, the Crisis of the Aristocracy and the Beginnings of Vernacular Historio­graphy in France,” Journal of Medi­eval History 12 (1986): 207–23) others, more numerous, have done so in a pro-Capetian spirit; the chronicle would be integrated into the Grandes Chroniques de France. 42  The work dates from 1213–1214 and its author, perhaps Wauchier de Denain, was then in the service of the chatelain of Lille, Roger IV. Guy Raynaud de Lage, “Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 684–86.

43  Louis-Fernand Flutre, “Fet des Romains,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 441–42; and Bernard Guenée, “La culture historique des nobles: le succès des Faits des Romains (xiiie–xve siècle),” in La noblesse au moyen âge. Essais à la mémoire de Robert Boutruche, ed. Philippe Contamine (Paris, 1976), 261–88, reprinted in Guenée, Politique et histoire, 299–326. The work, that dates from 1213–1214, had great success but its importance comes mainly because this compilation of the Roman history of the origins of Caesar was taken again as the main source for their Roman part by twenty French stories and novels (details in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink). 44  Olivier Collet, “Roman de César,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 855–56; Jean de Thuin, who was perhaps the author, would have written it about 1260.

45  Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Les débuts français de l’historio­graphie royale,” in Saint-Denis et la



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Nor do ecclesiastical historians appear to have had much to contribute to such a project. Beyond works devoted to religious history itself, most of them were involved in writing world histories. One of the most widely circulated chronicles in France, completed at the beginning of the twelfth century, was not, however, written by a Frenchborn author. The Cistercian Sigebert de Gembloux46 was from the Meuse; his world chronicle has the great merit of establishing a relatively reliable chrono­logy of the principal events in the history of the Empire. The Church was home to many other religious authors, from Cistercians like Aubry de Trois-Fontaine47 and Hélinand de Froidmont48 (whose chronicle is partially lost but has been recovered in his own compilation), to the Speculum Historiale, by the Dominican Vincent de Beauvais.49 Sigebert de Gembloux was also utilized by one of the great historians of Saint-Denis, Guillaume de Nangis, who is featured below. The same observations hold true for the other Dominican historians, Bernard Gui50 and Gérard de Frachet,51 and for the Augustinian canon, Jean de Saint-Victor.52 All these authors, even those who were closest to royal patronage, remained faithful to the traditional forms of the world chronicle and monastic chronicles. Moreover, Royauté. Etudes offertes à Bernard Guenée, ed. Françoise Autrand, Claude Gauvard, and Jean-Marie Moeglin (Paris, 1999), 395–404.

46  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Sigebert de Gembloux,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 1387–91; see Mireille Chazan, L’Empire et l’histoire universelle de Sigebert de Gembloux à Jean de Saint-Victor (xiie–xive siècle) (Paris, 1999).

47  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Aubry de Trois-Fontaine,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 110–11; This universal chronicle was written between 1227 and 1241. If he was a monk in Champagne, Aubri was a native of the Mosan country: Mireille Schmidt-Chazan, “Aubri de Trois-Fontaines, un historien entre la France et l’Empire,” Annales de l’Est 36 (1984): 163–92.

48  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Hélinand de Froidmont,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 666–68. This chronicle is partly lost; see Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Hélinand de Froidmont. Pour éclairer les dix-huit premiers livres de sa chronique. É� dition des titres, des chapitres et des notations marginales d’après le ms. du Vatican, Reg. lat. 535,” Spicae. Cahiers de l’Atelier Vincent de Beauvais 4 (1986): 81–254. 49  See Monique Paulmier-Foucart, “Histoire ecclésiastique et histoire universelle,” in Vincent de Beauvais: intentions et réception d’une œuvre historique au Moyen Âge, ed. Monique PaulmierFoucart, Serge Lusignan, and Alain Nadeau (Montréal, 1990), 87–110; Monique Paulmier-Foucart and Marie Christine Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais et le Grand Miroir du monde (Turnhout, 2004). The work was translated into French under the title of Miroir Historial for Queen Joan of Burgundy. 50  Marie-Henriette Jullien de Pommerol, “Bernard Gui,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 152–54; Anne-Marie Lamarrigue, Bernard Gui (1261–1331). Un historien et sa méthode (Paris, 2000). Here we have a chronicle of the Reges Francorum, which was a great success and would be translated by Jean Golein, derived from his main work, the Flores Chronicorum, composed in Avignon where he was the Attorney General of the Dominican Order before being named Bishop of Lodève.

51  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Gérard de Frachet,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 514–15. This universal chronicle had some success and was well known in Saint-Denis where Richard Lescot composed a continuation.

52  Isabelle Guyot-Bachy, Le “memoriale historiarum” de Jean de Saint-Victor. Un historien et sa communauté au début du xive siècle (Turnhout, 2000).

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the French monarchy also knew how to use them when it became a systematic patron of translations, notably of Vincent de Beauvais and Bernard Gui, allowing it to raise the prestige of the “language of the king” to serve its own interests. However, if the monarchy wanted a national history rooted in France it needed another strategy. The kings of France had already used monasteries and their scriptoria in the past to write and distribute works favourable to their lineage and their policies, notably the Benedictine monastery of Fleury (Saint-Benoî�t sur Loire), but the links were tenuous. Saint-Germain des Prés seems to be the place where this activity migrated from the end of the eleventh century, with a compilation taking the text of the chronicle of Aimoin de Fleury, which only went up to 65453 but was given its first series of additions at SaintGermain.54 However, it was above all with the abbey of Saint-Denis that the Capetians wove a fruitful alliance, strengthened in particular by the policy of Louis VI and the abbacy of Suger who, not content with beginning to build the magnificent Gothic church that would become the dynastic tomb of the sovereigns,55 also worked as a historian, writing the Vie de Louis VI.56 Using the work done at Saint-Germain des Prés,57 which they copied, deleting the additions about Saint-Germain (as at Fleury), the monks of Saint-Denis inserted into Aimoin’s text the Gesta Dagoberti Primi and then added Eginard’s Vita Karoli and the Chronique du Pseudo-Turpin for the Carolingian period and Suger’s Vie de Louis VI. They would then copy the two lives of Philip Augustus by Rigord (the Gesta Philippi Augusti)58 and the verse version provided by Guillaume le Breton,59 53  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Aimoin de Fleury,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 26–27.

54  For this para­graph see Pascale Bourgain, “La protohistoire des chroniques latines de SaintDenis,” in Saint-Denis et la Royauté. Etudes offertes à Bernard Guenée, ed. Françoise Autrand, Claude Gauvard, and Jean-Marie Moeglin (Paris, 1999), 375–94. 55  On the importance of this function in the relationship between the monarchy and the monastery see Alain Erlande-Brandebourg, Le Roi est mort: étude sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux des rois de France jusqu’à la fin du xiiie siècle (Paris, 1975); see also Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985), 83–125; and Colette Beaune, “Les sanctuaires royaux,” in Les lieux de mémoire, 2, La Nation, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris, 1986), 57–87.

56  Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. Henri Waquet (Paris, 1929; repr. Paris, 1964); see in general Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis. A Survey (Brookline, 1978).

57  This is MS Latin 12711 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, studied in JeanFrançois Lemarignier, “Autour de la royauté française du ixe siècle au xiiie siècle. Appendice: la continuation d’Aimoin et le manuscrit latin 12711 de la B.N.,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 113, no. 1 (1955): 5–36.

58  Marie-Henriette Jullien de Pommerol, “Gesta Philippi Augusti,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 1274–75.

59  His chronicle in Latin prose, the Gesta Philippi Augusti, is, in fact, a composite work, summing up Rigord first and continuing it until 1208: Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Guillaume le Breton,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 626–27; a second fragment (1208–1214) would have been composed to celebrate Bouvines and a third is the continuation until 1219, an anonymous monk having written a complementary part in 1219–1223. Guillaume le Breton then composed a poem, the Philippide, in which he partly reproduces the work in prose. The Philippide and the Gesta were translated into French.



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leaving a blank for the missing life of Louis VII. This first compilation was made at SaintDenis and was then included in another identical document in the mid-thirteenth century, to which a Vie de Louis VII and Vie de Louis VIII were added in 1285.60 The same was also done at Saint-Germain but with other texts, which seems to prove that the two monasteries pursued different, if not competing, routes. While these compilations reveal that both Saint-Germain and Saint-Denis were looking to build a national history in Latin, one step remained to be taken: that of language. A first attempt at a national history in French, evidence of which is provided by two manu­ scripts, does not appear to have been very successful. Although it did use some of the compilations we mentioned above, its author did not himself belong to Saint-Germain or Saint-Denis.61 It was in this latter monastery that the decisive step was taken, with the work of Primat, the author of this Roman des Rois which Louis had asked him to write and which was presented in 1273 to Philippe III the Bold. It provided the initial core of the Grandes Chroniques de France62 which, in fact, should be called Chroniques de France, as this is the title most often found in the manu­scripts. The title Grandes Chroniques de France was actually that of its first edition, continued until 1460 and printed in three volumes by Pasquier Bonhomme in 1477.63 The Roman essentially consists of a translation of the second Latin compilation from Saint-Denis64 and it seems to have circulated reasonably well,65 but its text was continually evolving. Later, translations of the lives of Louis IX (a compilation of previous bio­graphies) and Philippe III, written in Latin by the archivist monk of the abbey, Guillaume de Nangis, would be added.66 He was the author of a world chronicle in Latin running from the origins until the date of his death in 1300. Guillaume also wrote a Chronique abrégée des rois de France in Latin, which he translated into French at the end of his life. Two versions of it survive. The brief version was intended to serve as a guide for pilgrims visiting Saint-Denis to visit the tombs of the kings of France: the first version of the work had also been finished shortly after the 60  The results of the work of the compilers of Saint-Denis can be found in MSS Vatican Reg. Lat. 550, which dates from around 1200 and Latin 5925 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris: Bourgain, “La protohistoire,” 391–92.

61  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Essai d’une histoire nationale au xiiie siècle: la chronique anonyme de Chantilly-Vatican,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 148, no. 2 (1990): 301–54.

62  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Grandes Chroniques de France,” in Hasenohr and Zink, eds., Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, 296–98.

63  See Bernard Guenée, “Les Grandes Chroniques de France. Le Roman aux roys (1274–1518),” in Les lieux de mémoire, 1, La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris, 1984), 189–214; Jules Viard, ed., Les Grandes Chroniques de France (Paris, 1920–1953). 64  MS Latin 5925 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

65  Isabelle Guyot-Bachy, “La diffusion du ‘Roman des roys’ avant la guerre de Cent ans: le manu­ scrit de Pierre Honoré, serviteur de Charles de Valois,” in The Medi­eval Chronicle, II: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the Medi­eval Chronicle, Driebergen/Utrecht 16–21 July 1999, ed. Erik Kooper, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 2002), 2:90–102. 66  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Guillaume de Nangis,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 636–37.

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canonization of Saint Louis. This French version of the Chronique abrégée was very successful and it can also be found in certain versions of the Grandes Chroniques de France.67 But their canonical form is due to the revision by Richard Lescot, another monk from Saint-Denis, who revised Primat’s text and Guillaume de Nangis’ bio­graphies in depth and, above all, adapted the text to the unprecedented crisis the French monarchy was going through after Edward III’s claim to the French throne (1340), the disasters of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), and the captivity of Jean II le Bon, notably introducing the famous “Salic Law” to justify the royal title of the Valois. To do this, he uses many sources from outside Saint-Denis, such as the chronicle of Géraud de Frachet and the Chronique de Flandre. This Saint-Denis version took the history of France as far as 1347 and 1350; despite its quality, it enjoyed only modest success,68 and it was left to King Charles V to ensure the triumph of the Grandes Chroniques de France. Instead of asking the monks of Saint-Denis to write the history of the reign of his father, Jean le Bon and his family, he went to his chancellor, Pierre d’Orgemont. To ensure the circulation of this work, the king had a superb manu­script of the Grandes Chroniques de France copied in 1375 by Henri de Trévou, with rich illustrations. It contained a newly revised version (with, for example, a new version of the designation of Philippe VI as king of France in 1328) reaching 1350. Pierre d’Orgemont’s chronicle was continued in a second volume copied by Raoulet d’Orleans.69 In 1377, the two volumes were bound and provided with a continuation to 1379. In this form, the text was passed on to the Parisian bookshops, which produced many copies. In fact, more than a hundred manu­scripts of this version of the Grandes Chroniques de France have survived (compared with about twenty for all preceding versions). Judging by the many mentions of the text in inventories, wills, and catalogues, this seems to be a small fraction of the total number produced. The owners of these manu­scripts included many nobles and members of the French political elite, and their books were luxury manu­scripts with rich icono­graphy.70 It is significant that these copies were made in two great waves, the first in the reign of Charles VI, and then in the second half of the fifteenth century,71 after the second great crisis of the French monarchy. While this was going on, there was certainly much less chance of the vibrant affirmation of the 67  Isabelle Guyot-Bachy, “La ‘Chronique abrégée des rois de France’ de Guillaume de Nangis: trois étapes de l’histoire d’un texte,” in Religion et mentalités au Moyen Âge. Mélanges en l’honneur d’Hervé Martin, ed. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, Amaury Chauou, Daniel Pichot, and Lionel Rousselot (Rennes, 2003), 39–46.

68  Isabelle Guyot-Bachy and Jean-Marie Moeglin, “Comment ont été continuées les Grandes Chroniques de France dans la première moitié du xive siècle,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 163, no. 2 (2005): 385–433.

69  Guenée, “Les Grandes Chroniques,” 201; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 2813, the two volumes being connected.

70  Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the “Grandes Chroniques de France” (1274–1422) (Berkeley, 1991).

71  For a particularly sumptuous copy, see François Avril, Marie Thérèse Gousset, and Bernard Guenée, eds., Les Grandes Chroniques de France, Full Reproduction in Facsimile of the Miniatures by Fouquet: French Manu­script 6465 in the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris (Paris, 1987).



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legitimacy and continuity of the French royal dynasty being heard. The fifteenth-century versions were provided with continuations of diverse origins: the one for the period of 1380–1402 comes from Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Archbishop of Reims and brother of the Chancellor of France, Guillaume Juvénal des Ursins.72 However, all he probably did was to edit what was originally an abridged version of part of the chronicle of the monks of Saint-Denis.73 Meanwhile, the continuation for the period 1402–1422 was the work of Gilles le Bouvier, the Berry herald.74 As for the history of the reign of Charles VII, this was the work of the great champion of Saint-Denis and historio­grapher of France Jean Chartier,75 who summarized and extended the Latin chronicle of the reign he had already written. The Grandes Chroniques de France therefore ends with the death of Charles VII; this continuation was also “the last product of the Saint-Denis historio­graphic school,”76 as Louis XI chose as his historio­grapher Jean Castel (the grandson of Christine de Pisan), who ended his ecclesiastical career as Abbot of Saint-Maur. Of course, it would be impossible to reduce French historio­graphy to the Grandes Chroniques de France: the French also needed a world chronicle and the Speculum Historiale would continue to enjoy unflagging success until the end of the Middle Ages. It would also have the honour of being printed. Nor can we ignore the work of Froissart,77 which is everything but a national history. It is the story of the Hundred Years’ War,78 a history intended to please the nobility, which continued to be read in the sixteenth century on both sides of the Channel, where it was translated and printed,79 and in the Low Countries, where Enguerrand de Monstrelet80 was so carried away by the work 72  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Guillaume Juvénal des Ursins,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 795–97. 73  Louis F. Bellaguet, ed., Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis (Paris 1842; repr. Paris, 1994); see Bernard Guenée, Un roi et son historien. Vingt études sur le règne de Charles VI et la Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis (Paris, 1999); and Bernard Guenée, L’Opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Âge d’après la “Chronique de Charles VI” du Religieux de Saint-Denis (Paris, 2002). 74  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Gilles le Bouvier,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 539–40.

75  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Jean Chartier,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 761–62. 76  Guenée, “Les Grandes Chroniques,” 208.

77  Bernard Guenée, Du Guesclin et Froissart. La fabrication de la renommée (Paris, 2008), esp. 167–84. 78  Jean-Marie Moeglin, “Froissart, le métier d’historien et l’invention de la guerre de Cent Ans,” Romania 124 (2006): 429–70.

79  Chronicles, printed by Richard Pinson in 1523 (volume 1) and 1525 (volume 2): STC 11396 and 11397 [reeditions of the first volume I in 1542 and 1563]. The text was edited by Edward V. Utterson, Sir John Froissart’s Cronycles (London, 1812). Bernersa also translated into English the French version by René Berthault of the El Relox de Principe of Antonio Guevara, which was translated some fifteen times between 1535 and 1586. See Norman F. Blake, “Lord Berners: A Survey,” Medi­evalia et Humanistica 2 (1971): 119–32; and George Kane, “An Accident of History: Lord Berners’s Translation of Froissart’s Chronicles,” Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 217–25, as well as the article by James P. Carley, Oxford Dictionary of National Bio­graphy (Oxford, 2002).

80  Guenée, Du Guesclin, 183–84; Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Enguerrand de Monstrelet,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 409–10.

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that he decided to continue it. And we must also not forget that the Hundred Years’ War and the rise of the autonomy of the great principalities during the second crisis of the monarchy saw the development of princely historio­graphies, notably in Burgundy, with great historians like Georges Chastellain,81 Olivier de La Marche,82 and Jean de Wavrin,83 and in Brittany, with Pierre Le Baud84 and, a little later, Alain Bouchart.85 However, from then on, France had a national history in the language of the common people, and it is not useful to pursue this examination beyond the end of the fifteenth century. Even if this fact did not prevent historians from eventually distancing themselves from royal authority,86 these structures and orientations of this history would become established in subsequent generations, beginning with the Humanist historians87 and continuing until the French Revolution and even beyond.

Conclusion

Memory of the monarchy, memory of the kingdom? The conclusion is clear: French national history is not the history of the kingdom, and still less that of the French people: it is the history of the kings of France and the “great monarchy of France,” as Claude de Seyssel would soon be calling it. There followed a history of well-oiled successions, where the few accidents (Philippe V’s coup d’état, the fragile legitimacy of Philippe VI’s accession to the throne, and the risky positioning of Duke Louis of Orléans, fortunately redeemed by his reign as Louis XII) are skilfully masked, solidly linked to the past by devices the most famous of which is still redditus regni ad stirpem Karoli,88 re-establishing the link between the Carolingian dynasty and the one that finally snatched power. The effectiveness of these devices is even stronger because it is closely linked to other 81  Gillette Tyl-Labory and Sylvie Lefèvre, “Georges Chastellain,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 510–12. 82  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Olivier de La Marche,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 1085–86. 83  Gillette Tyl-Labory, “Jean de Wavrin,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 861–62.

84  Marie-Louise Auger, “Pierre Le Baud,” in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, ed. Hasenohr and Zink, 1180–81. 85  Alain Bouchart, Grandes croniques de Bretagne, ed. Marie-Louise Auger and Gustave Jeanneau (Paris, 1986).

86  Kathleen Daly, “‘Par un miroir en obscurité’? Le conseil politique dans les œuvres de Noël de Fribois (?–c.1467–1468) et de Mathieu Thomassin (c.1391–post 1457),” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 24 (2012): 99–112. 87  Franck Collard, Un historien au travail à la fin du xve siècle: Robert Gaguin (Paris, 1996).

88  Karl F Werner, “Die Legitimät der Kapetingerund die Entstehung des Reditus regni Francorum ad stirpem Karoli,” Die Weltals Geschichte 12 (1952): 203–25; Gabrielle Spiegel, “The Reditus Regni ad Stirpem Karoli Magni: A New Look,” French Historical Studies 7, no. 2 (1971): 145–74; and Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Vincent de Beauvais and the ‘De’redditus ad stirpem Karoli,’ ” in Vincent de Beauvais: intentions et réception d’une œuvre historique au Moyen Âge, ed. Monique PaulmierFoucart, Serge Lusignan, and Alain Nadeau (Montréal, 1990), 167–96.



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memorial structures, the dynastic necropolis of Saint-Denis, and, among others,89 the establishment of royal relics (Sainte Chapelle) intended to strengthen the image, reputation, and fama of Saint Louis. It is not, however, the “succession of kings”—an irreplaceable aspect of French historio­graphy—that makes it original. The chrono­logical framework of reigns is convenient, but it is also found in England. The key is the link between the monarchy and history-writing that led Charles V to entrust such writing to his own agents, the team that produced the chronicle of the chancellor, Pierre d’Orgement, before the post of royal historio­grapher ever existed. There is nothing of this on the English side, quite the contrary. There, royal relics did not manage to play a role90 and the dynastic sanctuary created at Westminster in the image of what Saint Louis was able to do in Saint-Denis was a failure. Under the Lancastrians, Westminster no longer played this role to the full.91 The chronicles that make up the history of England are quickly taken away by the language of the common people. The Benedictine chroniclers were marginalized, except for Ranulph Higden and his Polychronicon, but that is world history, not national history. The entire scene was virtually occupied by the London chronicles and the Bruts, whose authors were largely anonymous. Put another way, for most of the time we are looking at a history of the kingdom92 rather than that of a dynasty the continental interests of which largely contradict those of its political society. And it was for this reason that the national history of England was written. It is also interesting to note that, in medi­eval England, alongside history as such, the movement it is appropriate to call antiquarianism began very early. From the fourteenth century, many forerunners of it can be detected in the chronicles, including monastic ones, stimulated by the desire of the local elites who led political society to rediscover their local and family roots. The earliest representatives of this tendency are William of Worcester93 and John Rous;94 both are worthy of interest. An agent of Sir John Falstolf, William of Worcester travelled around England for his patron, taking notes on all 89  An overview in Beaune, Naissance de la nation France.

90  Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cam­bridge, 2001). 91  Antje Fehrmann, Grab und Krone. Königsgrabmäler im mittelalterlicchen England und die posthume Selbstdarstellung der Lancaster (Munich, 2008).

92  Two groups of texts are notable exceptions, the John Lydgate, “Verses on the Kings of England,” in Historical Poems of the xivth and xvth Centuries, ed. Rossell H. Robbins (New York, 1959), 3–6, and especially the genealogical works studied by Olivier de Laborderie, Ligne de reis. Culture historique, représentation du pouvoir et construction de la mémoire nationale en Angleterre à travers les généalogies royales en rouleau du milieu du xiiie siècle au milieu du xve siècle (PhD diss., EHESS Paris, 2002). 93  Kenneth B. McFarlane, “William Worcester: A Preliminary Survey,” in Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. James Conway Davies (Oxford, 1957), 196–221, reedited in Kenneth B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1981), 199–224. 94  Jean-Philippe Genet, “John Rous et l’histoire ancienne de l’Angleterre,” in Rerum gestarum Scriptor. Histoire et historio­graphie au Moyen Âge. Mélanges M. Sot, ed. Magali Coumert, MarieCéline Isaï�a, Klaus Krönert, and Sumi Shimahara (Paris, 2012), 225–3 5.

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the monuments, including the most insignificant ones (which he measured) and inquiring into local historical traditions. At the same time, he was making efforts to translate Cicero and compiling the Boke of Noblesse at the behest of Edward IV, with the aim of relaunching the English conquest of France.95 Rous, who spent his entire career in the shadow of the Beauchamps and the gloomy chaos of the collapse of the powerful house he served, hastily assembled as a final statement in their defence the Historia Regum Angliae. Dedicated to Henry VII, it wove together scraps of sermons and extracts from “historical” discourses dealing with the etymo­logy of local place names on a vaguely chrono­logical canvas. Into this he slipped an extraordinary early diatribe against enclosures, a phenomenon then beginning to lead to the disappearance of the traditional open field system of the Warwickshire peasant villages for the benefit of manors now surrounded by vast pastures forbidden to the peasants, who were in effect expelled. There was no equivalent to this movement in France. National fervour is, however, an area where France and England come together. In this specific context, national history becomes, in both cases, a “story of kings,” although the figure of Thomas Becket forms a dissonant counterpoint to that of Saint Louis. But, while the French royal succession drawn up in the scriptorium of Saint-Denis moves into the modern era via the pen of Robert Gaguin, with exemplary linearity in which the royal charisma is incessantly renewed from one dynasty to another, it was the Brut and the Chronicles of London which, in successive layers, wove a narrative which had been broadly stabilized by the beginning of the sixteenth century, as can be read in the Great Chronicle of London or Robert Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and France. This narrative took such little notice of kings that, via Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed,96 Shakespeare would appropriate it to create his Histories,97 finally giving a meaning to the confused story of murders and depositions by meticulously constructing a cycle of revenge, beginning with the inevitable but sacrilegious murder of the rex inutilis Richard II by Henry IV. In doing so, he stripped bare the power games in this republic of the nobility where, because power seemed within everyone’s reach, anyone might dare to conquer it, and revealed to spectators the abyss of passions thus induced. This was the way English medi­eval history was transferred into the field of national memory—the great national histories of the nineteenth century, like that of Macaulay, purely and simply eliminated the Middle Ages to begin with the Glorious Revolution of 1688—to triumph on the stage of the theatre. Meanwhile, after 1789, the French would have to invent a history of the French people, an enterprise successfully undertaken by the great historians of the Romantic period—Augustin Thierry, Guizot and, above all, Michelet—before Ernest Lavisse gave it its canonical, pedagogical form. Clearly there are two different systems of writing history and, at the heart of both of them, we find the problem of the relationship between power and political society. We would add that in

95  William Worcester, The Boke of Noblesse (London, 1860); a new edition by David Wakelin is forthcoming. 96  Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicle (Chicago, 1994).

97  Jean-Philippe Genet, “Shakespeare: Le Moyen Â� ge et la folie du pouvoir,” L’Histoire 384 (2013): 58–65.



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France there was even one perceptive spirit who went beyond the spell of the monarchy. This was Philippe de Commynes, and it is no coincidence that, in despair, he entitled his text—a text that remains a hapax, an unclassifiable and unparalleled work telling us what officially sanctioned history does not say—Mémoires.98

98  See Joël Blanchard, ed., 1511–2011 Philippe de Commynes. Droit, écriture: deux piliers de la souveraineté (Geneva, 2012).

Chapter 9

ART TO SEAL THE MEMORY: CORONATION CEREMONIES AND THE SWORD AS SYMBOL OF POWER (ARAGON, 1200–1400) MARTA SERRANO

Many scholars, of whom Adeline Rucquoi is one of the most prominent,1 have

recommended eradicating the term “legitimation” from any discussion of monarchical institutions in the Iberian Peninsula, a conclusion to which I concur after my studies on Spanish royal symbols and insignia in material, documentary, and icono­graphic sources.2 Successors to the throne of Aragon were authorized by the right of primogeniture; so, a successor’s investiture as King of Aragon was based on this principle alone. The case of James or Jaume I “the Conqueror” is illustrative because although he never took part in any coronation ceremony, in 1213 he was named King of Aragon immediately after the death of his father Peter the Great, King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, and Lord of Montpellier.3 Nevertheless, I use this problematic term extensively throughout *  This chapter was presented at Lleida in the congress “Memory in the Middle Ages” in 2011; it is also deeply indebted to my paper, “Art as Means of Legitimization in the Kingdom of Aragon: Coronation Problems and their Artistic Echos during the Reigns of James I and Peter IV,” IKON. Journal of Icono­graphic Studies 5 (2012): 161–72 and is part of the project “Memorias de la Guerra Medi­eval Hispana” (HAR2013–45266–P) led by Amancio Isla Frez and funded by the Ministerio de Economí�a y Competitividad of the Spanish Government.

1  See Manuel Nieto Soria, Orígenes de la monarquía hispánica: propaganda y legitimación (Madrid, 1999); Adeline Rucquoi and Nilda Guglielmi, eds., El discurso político en la Edad Media (Buenos Aires, 1995); and Adeline Rucquoi, ed., Realidad e imágenes del poder: España a fines de la Edad Media (Valladolid, 1988). For instance, Rucquoi led a seminar (which I attended) during the 2010– 2011 academic year at the É� cole des Hautes É� tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris entitled “Savoirs et pouvoirs dans la Péninsule Ibérique au Moyen Age,” which focused on the suitability and the shortcomings of certain concepts such as “legitimation” or “sanctification.” 2  The most recent of these are Marta Serrano, “Los signos del poder: regalias como comple­mento a los emblemas de uso inmediato,” Emblemata. Revista aragonesa de emblemática 17 (2011): 129–54; Jaume Aurell and Marta Serrano, “The Self-Coronation of Peter the Ceremonious (1336): Historical, Liturgical, and Icono­graphical Representations,” Speculum. A Journal of Medi­eval Studies 89, no. 1 (2014): 66–95; Marta Serrano, “Visualizing Monarchic Power from the 13th to 15th Centuries. An Example of Narrative Told through Chronicles and Funeral Images in the Iberian Peninsula,” Hortus Artium medi­evalium. Journal of the International Research Center for Late Antiquity and Middle Ages 21 (2015): 113–24. 3  Most of his seals are published in Ferran de Sagarra, Sigil·lografia catalana. Inventari, descripció

Marta Serrano ([email protected]) is Professora agregada–Serra Húnter Fellowship of Art History at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.

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this chapter because the fact that James I was denied a formal coronation led him to create a series of other techniques designed to legitimize his rule. One of the strongest and most illuminating arguments in favour of this hypothesis was put forward by Bonifacio Palacios,4 who stated that James I invoked the “right of conquest” to justify his sovereignty over newly conquered lands. However, as we will see, James I also employed other legitimizing narratives, such as the supposed assistance that he received from St. George during his conquest of the kingdoms of Mallorca and Valencia, because, of course, the idealized image of the monarch was not limited to the military sphere alone, but had to portray other virtues such as religious legitimacy. This chapter shows how and to what extent these legitimizing techniques, motivated by the lack of a Church-sanctioned coronation, were reflected in the icono­graphy of Iberian kings of the Middle Ages, in particular James I (the Conqueror) and Peter the Ceremonious, and how they were used to seal into memory a set of arguments. It also determines why Peter the Ceremonious, who had to assert his potestas over the increasingly powerful estates,5 was so active in disseminating these techniques through texts and images and thereby fixing them in the memory of his subjects. As has been stated elsewhere, Hispanic medi­eval culture was, in itself, a memorial culture that sought to foster solemn recollection in which art played an indispensable role.6

The Crown as Royal Symbol

Coronation ceremonies allowed medi­eval kings to demonstrate and exhibit their sovereignty over their subjects and their ministerium, as consecrated by ecclesiastical intervention during these highly significant rituals.7 In the case of the Crown of Aragon, after Peter the Catholic’s coronation in Rome, Pope Innocent III issued a document in 1205 that allowed the kings of Aragon to be crowned in Zaragoza by the local archbishop provided that the successors to the throne renewed and re-established the relationship i estudi dels segells de Catalunya, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1915–32). James I’s first wax seal read + S : I : REG : ARAG : COMIT : BARCH : ET : DNI : MONTIS PL. This title became longer as he conquered new territories, so the size of the seals also grew over time.

4  Bonifacio Palacios, “Los sí�mbolos de la soberaní�a en la Edad Media. El simbolismo de la espada,” in VII Centenario del Infante Don Fernando de la Cerda. Ponencias y comunicaciones, ed. Manuel Espadas Burgos (Ciudad Real, 1976), 273–96.

5  Ramon d’Abadal asserts that during the goverment of Peter the Ceremonious a real evolution took place in the concept of sovereignty, a process that culminated in him completely losing his power by the end of his life after the Parliament or Corts intervened in the Royal House: Ramon d’Abadal, Pere el Cerimoniós i els inicis de la decadència política de Catalunya (Barcelona, 1987), 263–79; and José Luis Martí�n, “Las cortes de Pedro el Ceremonioso,” in Pere el Cerimoniós i la seva època (Barcelona, 1989), 99–100.

6  Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medi­eval Culture (Cam­bridge, 1992).

7  See Carmen Orcástegui, “La coronación de los reyes de Aragón: evolución polí�tico-ideológica y ritual,” in Homenaje a Don Antonio Durán Gudiol (Huesca, 1995), 633–47 at 633. See also, among other studies, Antonio Durán, “El rito de la coronación del rey de Aragón,” Argensola 103 (1989): 17–39.



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Figure 9.1: Seals of Peter II of Aragon (1207, 1212) and James I of Aragon (1220–1226). From Ferran de Sagarra, Sigil·lografia catalana: inventari, descripció i estudi dels segells de Catalunya, 2 vols. in 3 (Barcelona, 1916–23), vol. 1, nos. 11 and 19.

of vassalage between the kingdom and the Holy See.8 Peter’s son, James I (1213–1276), had always aspired to more favourable conditions in this relationship of vassalage with the Church, whilst holding onto the idea of being crowned by the pope. In fact, both his career and his promotion of the arts demonstrate that he remained keen on carrying out this ceremony. Particularly illustrative, in this sense, is the crown that he commissioned and brought to Lyon, where he hoped to be crowned by the pontiff; he described the crown as being very valuable and made of gold and precious stones.9 But the conditions imposed by Innocent III were so disagreeable to James that he stated in his chronicle Llibre dels feyts del rei en Jacme (or Book of Deeds) that he preferred to return to his dominions without the crown on his head.10 This ill-fated coronation has conditioned traditional historio­graphy, which has perceived in this episode a decline in the value of the crown as a symbol of power.11 However, as will be seen, although in the Crown of Aragon the transmission of power could occur outside the coronation ceremony, the ceremony was considered to confer greater authority to the king.12 The relationship of vassalage between the kingdom and the Holy See would, particularly in the future, offer political significance in the legitimization of kings. James I never neglected the use of insignia; according to the symbolic mentality 8  Bonifacio Palacios, La coronación de los reyes de Aragón. 1204–1410. Aportación al estudio de las estructuras políticas medi­evales (Valencia, 1975), 77–78. The bull was published in Demetrio Mansilla, La documentación pontificia hasta Inocencio III (965–1216) (Rome, 1955), 346–47.

9  The crown was “made with gold and with precious stones that were worth more than [a] hundred thousand shillings of Tours” (feita amb aur et ab peres precioses que valia pus de cent mil·lia sous de torneses). Because of this, the king stated that he was certain nobody would find another crown in Lyon of equivalent value. Cited from Jaume I, “Llibre dels feyts,” in Les quatre grans cròniques, ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona, 1983), 536. 10  “[B]ecome less without the crown than with the crown” (tornar menys de corona que ab corona). Cited from Jaume I, “Llibre dels feyts,” 538. 11  Palacios, “Los sí�mbolos de la soberaní�a,” 285.

12  Orcástegui, “La coronación de los reyes de Aragón,” 640.

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Figure 9.2: Coronats of James I of Aragon: Valencia, Barcelona, and Aragon (1236–1276). From Miquel Crusafont, Acuñaciones de la Corona Catalano-Aragonesa y de los reinos de Aragón y Navarra (Madrid, 1992) (with kind permission of the author).

of the time13 the crown retained spiritual significance that embodied abstract concepts strongly linked with royalty. In fact, an analysis of his figurative images shows that the crown was used not only in all traditional artistic media, but also in images that until then had never featured this emblematic element (Figure 9.1). The equestrian representations on his seals are eloquent; on their reverse sides, where he appears as a warrior, the habitual helmets are replaced by a clearly visible crown. I would like to have been able to relate this phenomenon to James’s desire for a formal coronation, but the non-chrono­logical order of the pieces showing this insignia does not allow this hypothesis. However, everything seems to indicate that the adoption of the crown in royal insignia reflects a growing interest in the aesthetic current that was then beginning to prevail in the neighbouring kingdom of Castile–Leon, where Ferdinand III (1230–1252) was starting to favour the royal crown over the helmet, as was the English king, Henry III (1230–1252) (Figure 9.2).14 Coins, if understood as cognitive tools for remembrance, also provide evidence of this. James I implemented a series of financial measures in order to maintain monetary stability, and characteristic of these was his adoption in 1247 of a new type of coin recorded in documentation as the coronat. This coin was made of three materials, containing less silver than earlier coins and so was of lower value. It showed a cross on one 13  Authors who have studied this issue include Johan Chydenius, “La théorie du symbolisme médiéval,” Poétique 23 (1975): 322–41; Gerhart B. Ladner, “Medi­eval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism: a Comparison,” Speculum 54, no. 2 (1979): 223–56; Manuel Garcí�a Pelayo, “La Corona. Estudio sobre un sí�mbolo y un concepto polí�tico,” in Obras Completas, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1991), 2:995; and more recently Michel Pastoureau, Couleurs, images, symboles. Etudes d’histoire et d’anthropo­ logie (Paris, 1989).

14  In Castile and Leon, under Ferdinand III, seal number 40 dated 1231. Araceli Guglieri, Catálogo de sellos de la sección de sigilografía del Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid, 1974), 34. For Henry III of England, see Paul Delaroche, ed., Trésor de Numismatique et de glyptique ou Recueil général de médailles, monnaies, pierres gravées, bas-reliefs, etc. tant anciens que modernes. Les plus intéressants sous le rapport de l’art et de l’histoire. Sceaux des rois et reines d’Anglaterre (Paris, 1858), 4 (seals numbers 2 and 3).



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side (in a clear reference to Constantine)15 and, on the other side, a crowned bust that followed the model favoured in Provence, a territory over which James I believed he had a claim. In fact, the strong contacts between Provence and the king resulted in his request in 1241 for a papal dispensation to allow him to marry Sancha, the daughter of Count Ramon Berenguer, although the wedding never took place. Nevertheless, it is perhaps no coincidence that the coronat was first circulated in other territories, such as Barcelona, in 1258, this being the same year as the signing of the treaty of Corbeil. Under the terms of this treaty, James relinquished his claims over Provence and Languedoc in return for the suppression of the theoretical relationship of vassalage between the King of Aragon and the King of France.16

The Sword as Prime Symbol of Royalty

Despite the problems concerning the coronation ceremony, by instrumentalizing his own images and using them to stimulate the memory, James I used the crown as a symbol of dignity in most of his figurative images, sometimes employing it in artistic genres in which it was not habitually used. Nevertheless, this was despite the fact that neither he nor his successors accepted Peter the Catholic’s feudalization of the Kingdom of Aragon to the Holy See during Peter’s coronation in Rome. Consequently, James I, his immediate successor, was denied a formal coronation, which in turn led him to base his claims of sovereignty over new territories on the right of conquest;17 that is, one could claim to be the king of a territory simply by having conquered it. As a result, and as Palacios has affirmed, the sword necessarily grew in prominence as a symbol of authority18 and this revaluation was not limited to James I but rather extended beyond his government. Of particular note is Peter the Great’s (1276–1285) reference to the sword when rejecting French claims to the Catalan territories.19 From the thirteenth century chroniclers lauded kings for their military capacities and leadership qualities, a phenomenon that can be seen not only in the Crown of Aragon but also across Europe.20 In fact, before the sacramental acts of the coronation ceremony, the sovereign would be blessed and would receive his royal sword.21 Furthermore, this 15  See André Grabar, L’empereur dans l’art byzantin. Recherches sur l’art officiel de l’Empire d’Orient (Paris, 1936), 33–34. 16  Serrano, “Art as Means of Legitimization.”

17  Palacios, “Los sí�mbolos de la soberaní�a,” 285–86. 18  Palacios, “Los sí�mbolos de la soberaní�a,” 285–86.

19  Peter the Great rejected foreign claims by arguing that his ancestors had conquered these territories by the sword: “as my lineage has conquered it with the sword” (car mon llinatge la conqués ab l’espasa). Bernat Desclot, “Crònica,” in Les quatre grans cròniques, ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona, 1983), 543.

20  Including England, France, and Castile: Fernando Arias Guillen, “La imagen del monarca en el siglo xiv. Alfonso XI frente a Eduardo III,” e-Spania 11 (2011), accessed January 27, 2016, http://­ e-spania.revues.org/20412. 21  Palacios, “Los sí�mbolos de la soberaní�a,” 273–96.

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element became a royal emblem because it represented the king’s justice, the protection of the church against evil, and the guarantee of peace. The king appeared not only as a great warrior, but also as a highly competent governor who, among other things, would ensure justice was correctly meted out.22 He was both possessor and the giver of all legal authority.23 All these concepts were strongly developed under the government of Peter the Ceremonious, who strengthened the royal image as the main symbol of cohesion, security, and order of the crown.24 As his chronicle shows, he emphasized his personal attributes, likening them to those of Solomon, namely prudence, cunning, subtlety, wisdom, and justice.25 Icono­graphic Evidence

We have various evidence that throughout the thirteenth century the sword became a characteristic emblem of the Crown of Aragon. The primary evidence for this can be found in sigillo­graphic icono­graphy, which is particularly eloquent on the matter, especially if we recall that seals served legal and validating functions and were regarded as unequivocal manifestations of the king. In fact, the strength of this manifestation can be seen in various protocols described in medi­eval chronicles. For example, when the king died seals would be deliberately broken during the solemn funeral ceremony.26 Before analyzing the sigillo­graphy, though, it should be noted that in other kingdoms equestrian representations of the king tended to display an interest in new chivalrous forms and a desire to abandon certain ritual practices linked to ecclesiastical power.27 However, in 22  These ideas were expressed by Walter Ullmann and Jean Flori, both synthesized in Enrique Rodrí�guez-Picavea, “Ideo­logí�a y legitimación del poder en la Castilla del siglo xiv. La imagen regia en el Poema de Alfonso X,” Medi­evalismo. Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medi­evales, 22 (2012): 185–216.

23  Tomàs de Montagut, “La recepción del derecho feudal común en Cataluña (notas para su estudio),” in Estudios sobre renta, fiscalidad y finanzas en la Cataluña bajomedi­eval, ed. Manuel Sánchez (Barcelona, 1993), 166–67. 24  José Á� ngel Sesma, “La monarquí�a aragonesa,” in Monarquía, crónicas, archivos y cancillerías en los reinos hispano-cristianos: siglos xiii, xiv, ed. Esteban Sarasa (Zaragoza, 2014), 417.

25  As can be seen in the pro­logue to his chronicle, according to Raquel Homet, “El discurso polí�tico de Pedro el Ceremonioso,” in El discurso político en la Edad Media, ed. Adeline Rucquoi and Nilda Guglielmi (Buenos Aires, 1995), 97–115 at 101–2.

26  “[…] and before taking the body a ceremony was used that […] must have been ancient in the royal house of Aragon: that in the presence of the people Don Rodrigo de Rebolledo [who was his great private assistant and companion in arms] as the high butler of the King asked for the royal seals from the protonotary and secretaries who were present and broke them with his hand, saying three times that the king was dead” ([…] y antes de llevar el cuerpo se usó de una ceremonia que […] debí�a ser antigua en la casa real de Aragón: que en presencia del pueblo don Rodrigo de Rebolledo [que fue su gran privado y compañero en las armas] como camarero mayor del rey pidió los sellos reales al protonotario y secretarios que estaban presentes y los quebró por su mano, diciendo tres veces que el rey su señor era muerto). Cited from Jerónimo de Zurita, Anales de Aragón, ed. Á� ngel Canellas López, 9 vols. (1562; Zaragoza, 1967–90) 8:357 (book 20, chap. 27).

27  As stated by Palacios, “Los sí�mbolos de la soberaní�a,” 273–96; and Isidro Bango, “De las



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Figure 9.3: Seals of James I of Aragon (1220–1226 and 1238–1276). From Ferran de Sagarra, Sigil·lografia catalana: inventari, descripció i estudi dels segells de Catalunya, 2 vols. in 3 (Barcelona, 1916–23), vol. 1, nos. 19 and 28.

Figure 9.4: Lead seals of James I of Aragon (after 1231). From Ferran de Sagarra, Sigil·lografia catalana: inventari, descripció i estudi dels segells de Catalunya, 2 vols. in 3 (Barcelona, 1916–23), vol. 1, no. 29.

the Crown of Aragon things worked differently: the dual title held by the kings, who from 1164 were both kings and counts, led them to use a double image on their seals right through to the end of the Middle Ages: the king enthroned on the obverse and as a count on horseback on the back.28 In the larger pieces commissioned by James I, he very quickly abandoned the sceptre in favour of the sword (Figure 9.3). On the obverse sides of the seals (Figure 9.4), the king appeared seated on his throne holding in his left hand a pommel and in his right hand a sword that always rested horizontally on his knees.29 insignias reales en la España medi­eval,” in Imágenes y promotores en el arte medi­eval, Miscelánea en homenaje a Joaquín Yarza Luaces, ed. Marí�a Luisa Melero (Bellaterra, 2001), 59–66 at 59. 28  Regarding these images throughout the medi­eval period, see Serrano, “Visualizing Monarchic Power,” 113–24. 29  Sagarra, Sigil·lografia catalana, 204 (no. 19).

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This innovation can also be seen in lead pieces, in particular those that appeared after the conquest of Mallorca,30 in which the sceptre was replaced by a vertical sword and, so, removed definitively from the seals of the Conqueror. The proven transposition of these sigillo­graphic models to other genres is the reason these changes in James’s seals are seen as precursors of similar changes in other artistic media such as miniatures. Examples of this can be found in the illustrations in the In excelsis Dei thesauris, created between 1276 and 1290.31 As I have argued in a previous work, an image that is reiterated in different media is more easily recognized, understood, and taken on board by those who observe it, that is, they have not only the ability to identify the individual portrayed, but also to recall the contents and the symbolic value that emanate from the image itself.32 It might be supposed that James I’s introduction of the sword into his seals would not prove to be a lasting innovation given that his son, Peter the Great, reintroduced the sceptre into images of himself on the throne, where it became an essential and permanent element on the obverses of the seals of all his successors until Ferdinand the Catholic (1479–1516). Yet, although the sword was removed from the obverses, it was introduced to the reverses, which from that point would show the sovereign in full armour on horseback, draped in the coat of arms of Aragon, and brandishing a sword in place of the traditional lance and banner.33 Moving the sword from the obverse to the reverse was a more appropriate icono­graphic adaptation; the sword now formed part of the image of the king as warrior and as such occupied the best place for communicating its meaning as a natural symbol of the right of conquest. As a result, from this moment until the end of the Middle Ages the sword was shown with the king, who was depicted as a knight who had gained sovereignty over a territory by the sword. It should be recalled that kings could also justify the use of the sword because of their status as miles Dei or propugnator Ecclesia; that is, as defenders and conquerors of land for Christianity, and as guardians of order and peace and administrators of justice.34 Coercive power was seen as a necessary and inherent element of politics;35 consequently the princep e senyor 30  Dated between 1231 and 1238 according to the title: + IA : REG : ARAG : 7 REGNI : MAIORICARVM / COMIT ∙ BARCH 7 VRGL ∙ 7 DONI MOTISP ∙ LI. Sagarra, Sigil·lografia catalana, 206 (no. 25). 31  Malibu, Getty Museum, MS Ludwig, XIV, 4; facsimile edition in Vidal de Canellas, Vidal Mayor, ed. Agustí�n Ubieto Arteta (Huesca, 1989).

32  In the same way that the memory of an individual or an event can be cemented through repeated experiences: Marta Serrano, “La imagen como recurso memorialista: el espejo del rey de Aragón,” La memoria del poder, el poder de la imagen, ed. Esther López Ojeda (Nájera, 2017), 385–422, esp. 394ff. 33  See Sagarra, Sigil·lografia catalana, 207–8 (nos. 32–34).

34  Bango, “De las insignias reales,” 59; and Á� lvaro Fernández de Córdoba, “Los sí�mbolos del poder real,” in Los Reyes Católicos y Granada, ed. Alberto Bartolomé and Carlos José Hernando (Granada, 2005), 37–58 at 50. As is well-known, the king with a drawn sword and looking upwards is the most common representation of royal justice. In the case of the Crown of Aragon, see Marta Serrano, Effigies Regis Aragonum. La imagen del rey de Aragón en la Edad Media (Zaragoza, 2015). 35  As was recognized by, among others, Francesc Eiximenis, see Á� ngel López-Amo, “El pensamiento polí�tico de Eiximenis en su tratado de ‘Regiment de Prínceps’,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho



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was an authoritarian figure invested with the power to bestow privileges, freedoms, and justice on his subjects whilst also being responsible for the defence of homes and lands.36

Documentary Evidence

The second type of evidence that demonstrates how the sword became a royal symbol is documentary and comes primarily from chronicle sources.37 I will not go in depth into the meaning of this emblem as a weapon of justice, although it was essential given current political theory; suffice to say that it may be a biblical influence and the result of the sovereigns’ desire to compare themselves with certain Old Testament kings who were regarded as models of a roi très chrétien, namely Moses, David, or Solomon, among other examples.38 Peter the Ceremonious’s chronicle began by likening the king to David and Lot, seeking to align the king with the side of the righteous.39 These comparisons, which are scattered throughout the medi­eval writings of the Crown of Aragon, rarely appeared in royal Aragonese icono­graphy. For this reason, it is highly surprising that the first page of the Aureum Opus from Alzira depicted James I as King David, symbolizing the beginning of a new holy dynasty in Valencia and showing a mental process of association that presents the genealogical image as a metaphor of new concepts that go beyond mere noble lineage.40 We should underline the perception of the sword as a weapon of war and the bravery and competence of the sovereign who wields it with having dexterity against his enemies, a meaning clearly seen in some verses of the Psalms.41 This is precisely how one should interpret the reference in James I’s Llibre dels feyts to Tisó, the sword favoured Español 17 (1946): 5–139; and Marc B. Escolà, “Sobre la teoria de poder en el tractat de Francesc Eiximenis: regiment de la cosa pública,” Finestrelles 5 (1994): 189–204. See also Bonifacio Palacios, “El mundo de las ideas polí�ticas en los tratados doctrinales españoles: los ‘espejos de prí�ncipes’ (1250–1350),” in Europa en los umbrales de la crisis (1250–1350), XXI Semana de Estudios Medievales de Estella (Pamplona, 1995), 463–83.

36  “graces and liberites […] justice and equalities and defend their places and inheritances” (gràcies et llibertats […] justí�cia et equaltats y defendre lurs lochs et heredats), as Peter the Ceremonious stated in 1383. Cited from Josep Maria Sans i Travé, ed., Cort General de Montsó, 1382–1384 (Barcelona, 1992), 78.

37  Regarding historio­graphy as an effective propagandistic tool, consolidating and justifying the status and power of the monarchy, see Jaume Aurell, “Els discursos del poder: la funció polí�tica de la historiografia,” in L’Edat Mitjana: Món real i espai imaginat, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Catarroja, 2012), 135–47.

38  Desclot states that the Sicilian people compared Peter the Great with Moses: Desclot, “Crònica,” 474 (chap. 87). Moses said in the Old Testament: Num. 32:41: “I will sharpen my flashing sword, and my hand shall lay hold of my quiver.” 39  As was highlighted by Homet, “El discurso polí�tico,” 99.

40  Details in Marta Serrano, Jaime I el Conquistador. Imágenes medi­evales de un reinado (Zaragoza, 2008), 235–39. See also Serrano, “La imagen como recurso memorialista,” 402–3. 41  Among them, Ps. 45:3: “Gird your sword upon your hip, mighty warrior! In splendour and majesty ride on triumphant!”

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by James I for being “very good and propitious for those who wield her.”42 That a sword should come to life when given a name was new to the Kingdom of Aragon and suggests that Tisó had joined the ranks of other celebrated swords such as Durandal, Joyeuse, and Excalibur, which belonged to the legendary figures of Roland, Charlemagne, and King Arthur.43 Shortly after, according to the chronicle of Peter the Ceremonious, Alfonso the Benign named his own sword Vilardell,44 while in the same document, King Peter mentioned the following five swords: San Martín, Villar de Lo, Girueta, Clareta, and Tició.45 Despite the rather strange fact that the names of swords never actually appear on the swords themselves,46 it makes sense to identify Tizona with Tisó,47 the sword that, according to the Crónica de San Juan de la Peña, was given by James I on his deathbed to his son Peter to indicate that he was transferring the kingdom to him: “My Son: I lend you my sword as a sign of rightness; with her you will discern good from evil. With the lordship I confer on you, God will give you victory against your enemies.”48 Thus the sword was passed on to the heir to symbolize the transfer of authority, and the giving of the sword to the new king became a widespread feature of coronation ceremonies in other medi­eval kingdoms as well as the Crown of Aragon. It is particularly interesting49 that this was the only insignia James would formally hand down to his successor, a transfer that is not mentioned in the Llibre dels feyts and that appears for the first time 42  “Molt bona e aventurosa a aquells qui la portaven.” Cited from Jaume I, “Llibre dels feyts,” 174. These words were reproduced in other later chronicles such as the one by Zurita, who said: “It is written that it was greatly appreciated in those times and was taken for good fortune, and they sent it from Monzón and called it Tizona” (se escribe que fue muy preciada en aquellos tiempos y la tení�a por venturosa, y se la enviaron de Monzón y la llamaron Tizona). Cited from Zurita, Anales de Aragón (Valencia, 1968), 3:133–35 (book 3, chap. 34). 43  Jean-Paul Roux, Le roi. Mythes et symboles (Paris, 1995), 199.

44  Ricardo del Arco, Sepulcros de la Casa Real de Aragón (Madrid, 1945), 288.

45  Some of these are mentioned in the royal chronicles: “after he had broken a spear he was carrying, without having seen that the enemies were near, he took his sword, called Viladell, into his hands and immediately the enemies noticed it and started to flee” (aprés que hac trencada una llança que portaba, no guardant que los enemics lo tenien enmig [...] mes les mans a la sua espaa, qui ha nom Vilardell, e encontinent, los enemics se cenceren e començaren a fugir). Cited from Pere el Cerimoniós, “Crònica,” in Les quatre grans cròniques, ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona, 1983), 1014 (chap. 1.29). 46  On this subject and all related hypotheses, although in a different geo­graphical area than the one that concerns the present study, see Susan E. Brunning, The “Living” Sword in Early Medi­eval Northern Europe: An Interdisciplinary Study (PhD diss., Uni­ver­sity College London, 2013).

47  Identification taken from Palacios, “Los sí�mbolos de la soberaní�a,” 285; who agrees with Percy Ernst Schramm, Las insignias de la realeza en la Edad Media Española (Madrid, 1960), 93. For further information on this sword, see José Antonio de Mesa Alcalde, “Genealogí�a de la Tizona,” Trastámara. Revista de Ciencias Auxiliares de la Historia 1 (2008): 37–61.

48  “Fillo mí�o, yo livro la mi spada en sennyal de dreytura con la qual tu departescas mal de bien, e livrote la mia sennyria con la qual te de Dios victoria contra los tus enemigos.” These words are almost identical to those that appear in other chronicles, such as that of Jerónimo de Zurita, which is referred to in the study by Pedro Marsilio. See Zurita, Anales de Aragón, 1:209 (book 3, chap. 101). 49  As pointed out by Palacios, “Los sí�mbolos de la soberaní�a,” 285.



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in the aforementioned chronicle commissioned by Peter the Ceremonious, who used the sword not only to legitimize himself but to emulate his illustrious predecessor, whom he referred to as the “santo rey.”50 It is illuminating that Peter left this same sword in his will to his firstborn, the Infante John, who used it in 1370.51 The sword acquired a new role in Peter the Ceremonious’s book The Coronation Ceremony of the Kings of Aragon, in which Peter aimed to codify the royal ritual by turning it into a visual spectacle for the monarchy. Although his father, Alfonso the Benign, set down the original outline for the ceremony, Peter the Ceremonious turned it into a real propaganda exercise aimed at legitimizing the institution he represented.52 Written in 1353 and entitled Ordinación hecha por el muy alto y muy Excelente Príncipe y Señor, el Señor Don Pedro III, Rey de Aragón, de cómo los Reyes de Aragón se hacen consagrar, y ellos mismos se coronan or De la manera con los reys darago se faran consegrar e ells mateix se coronaran,53 the book states that the sword should be given to the sovereign as a sign of royalty, or as the text puts it: “tibi regaliter impositum.”54 As with the other insignia, the king had to take the sword from the altar and put it around his waist without the aid of another person.55 This is an important requisite, first because of the analogies with his esteemed predecessor James I when he was knighted in Tarazona,56 and second because 50  Referring to the moments before James’s death, the Crónica de San Juan de la Peña says: “The said holy king took off his clothing” (El dito santo rey se despulló los vestidos). Cited from Carmen Orcástegui, Crónica de San Juan de la Peña (versión aragonesa) (Zaragoza, 1986), 286 (chap. 35). A reference to the king as holy can also be found in the documents concerning his burial in Santa Marí�a de Poblet, which Master Aloy was ordered to carry out by Peter the Ceremonious. Charles de Tourtolon, Jacme Ier le Conquérant, 2 vols. (Montpellier, 1867), 2:603–9 (document 21).

51  Significantly, the sword is the first of the insignia to appear, according to Mesa, “Genealogí�a de la Tizona,” 48.

52  In the coronation ceremony of Alfonso the Benign there were two consecutive masses with the king acting as minister. He was knighted and took the sword from the altar and offered himself to God: Palacios, “La coronación,” 19. See also Orcástegui, “La coronación de los reyes de Aragón,” 633–48; Aurell and Serrano, “The Self-Coronation of Peter the Ceremonious,” 66–95. 53  This manu­script is an extended copy of the text from the one kept in El Escorial. Among other things, this was aimed at removing from the liturgy any subordination to the church and is also dedicated to De la manera con les reynes d’arago se faran consegrar e los reys darago les coronaran according to the incipits on fols. 129r and 148r. For previous models, see Palacios, “La coronación,” 264–67. The date is given in a letter issued in Valencia. In January 1353 the king sent a decree from Valencia ordering the creation of a new coronation ritual for the kings and queens of Aragon. Palacios, “El ceremonial,” in Ceremonial de Consagración y Coronación de los Reyes de Aragón. Ms. R. 14.425 de la Biblioteca de la Fundación Lázaro Galdiano en Madrid, ed. Eduardo Vicente de Vera (Zaragoza, 1992), 127. 54  Á� ngel San Vicente, “El códice y su transcripción,” in Ceremonial de Consagración y Coronación de los Reyes de Aragón. Ms. R. 14.425 de la Biblioteca de la Fundación Lázaro Galdiano en Madrid, ed. Eduardo Vicente de Vera (Zaragoza, 1992), 25.

55  “[T]ook the sword from the altar and he himself put it on without the help of anyone else” (prenga l espada del altar e éll mismo cí�ngasela sines ayuda de otra persona). Cited from San Vicente, “El códice y su transcripción,” 26.

56  James I in turn was continuing an innovation started by Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon and described it thus: “we put on the sword we took from over the altar” (nos cenyim la espasa

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of the contrast between this ceremony and the last one featured in Rome, in which Peter the Catholic first placed the sceptre and diadem on the altar and was then handed the sword by the pope, according to the description given by de Zurita.57 Peter the Ceremonious wrote his “Ordinations about how the Kings and Queens of Aragon are consecrated and crowned” (Ordinacions con los reys e reynas d’Aragó se consagren e·s coronen) to create a great political spectacle that would solemnly underline his royal power to his subjects and the nobility, but a letter from 1367 reveals his preoccupation with obtaining a royal liturgy to his liking and, once again, his desire to emulate James I. This has been asserted so forcefully by Cingolani, who presented the notion of “imitating in order to surpass”58 as indispensable to a correct understanding of Peter the Ceremonious’s military and personal actions. In the letter he asked to be sent the coronation sacraments of his predecessors, in particular “that which made James king of Mallorca.”59 The fact that he only mentions Mallorca, and not other conquests such as Valencia or Murcia, is significant and brings me to the third kind of evidence: material evidence, although none of this has survived down to the present day. Material Evidence

Leaving aside the fact that Santa Maria de Poblet houses one of the greatest attempts from the Late Middle Ages to preserve memory and, from the outset, had a clear political and institutional purpose for managing memory,60 we will start, first of all, with a sword that was found in 1856 with the body of James I at that monastery and which provides plenty of scope for conjecture. The sword dated from the fourteenth century61 and is now lost, but it must be related, as del Arco asserts,62 to when James’s remains were transferred from their simple wooden case located in the presbytery of the church63 to a new que prenguem de sobre l’altar). Cited from Jaume I, “Llibre dels feyts.” For more information, see Bonifacio Palacios, “Investidura de armas de los reyes españoles en los siglos xii y xiii,” Gladius special number (1988): 153–92 at 188–89. 57  Zurita, Anales de Aragón, 1:138–43 (book 2, chap. 51).

58  Stefano Maria Cingolani, “Del monasterio a la cancillerí�a. Construcción y propagación de la memoria dinástica en la Corona de Aragón,” in La construcción medi­eval de la memoria regia, ed. Pascual Martí�nez Sopena and Ana Rodrí�guez (Valencia, 2011), 363–86 at 377–78.

59  “The oath done by our predecessors in their coronation, and specially this one was done by King James who had conquered Mallorca” (Lo sagrament per lo qual se fa per los reys nostres predecessors en lur coronació, e specialment aquell que feu lo rey en Jacme qui pres Mallorques). Signed in Zaragoza, July 6. Cited from Antoni Rubió, Documents per a la història de la cultura catalana mig-eval, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1908), 1:216 (document 222). 60  I have mentioned on another occasion that it was regarded by Peter the Ceremonious as a reli­ quary of his dinasty. See Serrano, “La imagen como recurso memorialista,” 412–14.

61  See the notes given by Miret i Sans and the studies of Barón de las IV Torres. Joaquí�n Miret i Sans, “La cabeza del rey Jaime I de Aragón,” Revue Hispanique 9 (1902): 216–19; quoted in Arco, Sepulcros, 193. 62  Arco, Sepulcros, 193.

63  See Fray Vicente Prada, Sepulcros de la casa RL. de Aragon, Condes de Urgel, Duques de Segorbe, y Cardona, Varones, Señores de Vassallos, Cavalleros, Obispos, Abades, y otros muchos, que descansan,



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Figure 9.5: Shrine of James I of Aragon, the contents of the tomb, the original one, with the now-vanished sword from the fourteenth century, and the image on the tomb. Poblet, Monastery of Saint Maria of Poblet (© Abadia de Poblet).

tomb built and sculpted on Peter the Ceremonious’ orders.64 This transfer was carried out as part of a programme aimed at glorifying the dynasty and included the construction of a pantheon in the Cistercian monastery.65 In fact, Peter the Ceremonious chose this monastery in 1340 as the burial place for his own remains; moreover, in 1377 he decided that the abbey would without exception also be the burial site for all his successors. This decision was at odds with the hitherto Franciscan preferences of recent members of the royal house.66 Indeed, judging by documentation,67 Peter the Ceremonious’s main interest was to rest in eternum at the side of the Holy King James (Figure 9.5).68 Lack of space prevents me from going further into this question in the present study, but I believe that everything indicates that when Peter the Ceremonious had James’s

y eligieron sepultura en el Insigne y R. Monasterio de Nrā Sra. De Poblet, Orden del Cister. Elvcidados por un indigno Monge de dicho RL. Monastº. Dedicados A la Concepcion Purissima de la Reyna y Emperatriz de los Cielos María Sra. Nrā. Año 1692 in Espluga de Francolí�, Biblioteca de Poblet, MS Arm. 6. C. 19.39, fol. 4r; and Eduardo Toda i Guell, Panteones reales de Poblet. Destrucción, Envío de los fragmentos a Tarragona y Abandono de los sótanos municipales, en 1854. Traslado al Museo Provincial en 1894, Restitución al monasterio en 1933 (Tarragona, 1935), 5. 64  See Arco, Sepulcros, 193.

65  The oldest document we know of that mentions James I’s burial in Santa Maria de Poblet is from Barcelona and is dated August 13, 1340, although it also mentions an earlier letter issued in Zaragoza, on March 1 of the same year. Frederic Marés, Las tumbas reales de los monarcas de Cataluña y del monasterio de Santa María de Poblet (Barcelona, 1952), 90.

66  Constance of Sicily, Marie of Lusignan, and Sibila of Fortià were all buried in the monastery of San Francisco in Barcelona. This monastery was a pantheon in itinere: it was the resting place of Kings Alfonso the Liberal and James II until they were definitively moved to Poblet. Also in Barcelona, one can find Elisenda de Montcada in Pedrabes, the Poor Clares monastery that she founded. In contrast, Alfonso the Benign and his second wife Eleanor of Castile were buried in San Francisco in Lleida, whereas his first wife rests in San Francisco in Zaragoza. 67  Arco, Sepulcros, 189.

68  Arco, Sepulcros, 186.

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body moved to the new sarcophagus, he also ordered a sword to be placed along with his predecessor; that is, the man who had first adopted this symbol. It is no coincidence that the recumbent figures on James’s shrine were sporting the insignia that Peter regarded as the most emblematic of his status: the Aragonese coat of arms, the crown, and the sword. A double recumbent sculpture shows the king’s role as both governor and monk, perhaps referring to his priestly ministrations, a common element in Israelite kingship69 that most medi­eval sovereigns were at pains to emulate. Leaving aside the concept rex et sacerdos and its icono­graphic echo in the fourteenth century, according to the surviving documentation, the only instructions given to the sculptors in Poblet were that they should make “the figure of a crowned king in one part of the shrine […] and the figure of a monk dressed in his habit and with the royal crown on his head in the other.”70 These instructions make no mention of the sword; however, this element is included in the image because the expression “crowned king” is understood to refer to all aspects of the state or condition of being king, as it is in other important texts such as Tirant lo Blanch.71 That is, this should be interpreted as a desire to represent a hierarchical effigy adorned with the insignia that the sovereign acquires on being crowned including, and in accordance with Peter the Ceremonious’s coronation ceremony, the sword. Although the instruction regarding the second recumbent figure dressed as a monk is to be expected, the reason for the inclusion of the sword on the shrine is more contentious. One possible interpretation is that the stone image on the tomb is a mirror image of its actual contents and, therefore, allowed Peter the Ceremonious to create a permanent popular image of James I that would last down the centuries, because, as Molina has stated, although the sculptures were placed high up, they were intended to be observed; that is, the entire cemetery was devised by Peter the Ceremonious to be seen and admired by a wider audience than we at first imagined.72 Leaving aside whether or not this hypothesis is correct, there is no doubt that Peter the Ceremonious, clearly in awe of his predecessor James I, was instrumental in promoting this insignia as a means of legitimation. Further evidence of Peter’s attempts to legitimize his rule using this regalia can be seen when he commissioned a coronation sword from Pere Bernés in 1360. The scabbard of this sword is particularly important because it features both Peter and his predecessor, James I. In a contractual document, Peter specified: 69  Keith W. Whitelam, “Israelite Kingship: The Royal Ideo­logy and Its Opponents,” in The World of Ancient Israel, ed. Ronald E. Clements (Cam­bridge, 1989), 130.

70  “A figura e a manera de rey coronat en la una part del seu vas, e altra a figura e manera de monge ab son abit vestit e qui jau tinent corona reyal en son cap.” Cited from Rubió, Documents, 1:226 (document 235). 71  The expression “crowned king” (rei coronat) with this same meaning can be found in chaps. 115, 224, 307, 317, 325, and 334. Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanch (Valencia, 2006).

72  Joan Molina, “La memoria visual de una dinastí�a. Pedro IV el Ceremonioso y la retórica de las imágenes en la Corona de Aragón (1336–1387),” Anales de Historia del Arte 23 (2013): 219–41 at 238.



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We particularly want the scabbard […] to have nineteen enamels from one end to another […]. These enamels should contain the kings of Aragon and counts of Barcelona both past and present.73

Without going further into the connections with other royal commissions, such as the genealogy that features in the main throne room (Saló del Tinell) at the Royal Palace (Palau Reial) in Barcelona where dynastic continuity was used to express visually the monarchy’s legitimacy and prestige, to understand the meaning of this sword, it is essential to relate it to Peter’s aforementioned “Ordination of how the kings of Aragon are consecrated”, which turned the coronation into a visual spectacle.74 Given the importance of the ceremony, which had by now become a display of power and munificence, the elements that were used in it, including the insignia, had to be carefully selected. I will add nothing further regarding the importance of the sword in this ceremony other than that Peter’s promotion of the sword was also probably very much influenced by his conquest of Mallorca. In this sense, I think the king, understanding the ornamentation of this regalia as a visual device and as a categorical mnemonic technique, adopted two important concepts to emphasize and recall over time the stability of the monarchy, namely lineage and territorial expansion, both of which were easily identifiable on the scabbard’s icono­graphy.75 After annexing the island kingdom (illicitly because he was in contravention of the provisions of James I’s will), Peter the Ceremonious appreciated the value of the weapon because the genealogy depicted on its scabbard had a legitimizing effect on his conquest. Furthermore, the decoration proclaimed a continuous, uninterrupted, but nevertheless false dynastic succession that would take place in the various kingdoms over which the new monarch would rule once he had been crowned. Furthermore, Peter was again able to compare himself with James by linking the sword to the right of conquest that formed the basis of his power and by handing down to his heirs an emblematic sword that would play a similar role in their investitures to the role played by Tisó when James handed it down to his successor Peter the Great. Of course, all of this is closely linked with the fact that, as Aurell points out, in the Middle Ages it was common practice to recreate the past within the present to legitimize contemporary political practices.76 Consequently, the sword had a political purpose: to bring the past into the present. The scabbard was nothing other than a visual display of the historical rights that explained the legitimacy of the king and his jurisdictional claims. 73  “[…] mas en special volem que en la behina a defora haia de I cap al alter.XIX. esmalts qui sien en manera fets que en cascu puxa esser feta una figura de rey o de comte. Car en los dits esmalts volem fer fer les figures dels reys d’Arago e comtes de Barchinona passats e la nostra.” Document signed in Tarazona, on February 28. Cited from Rubió, Documents, 1:191–92 (document 193).

74  See Fréderic-Pau Verrié, “La polí�tica artí�stica de Pere el Cerimoniós,” in Pere el Cerimoniós i la seva època (Barcelona, 1989), 177–92 at 178. 75  For these concepts and their use by the Ceremonious, see Sesma, “La monarquí�a aragonesa,” 69–76. 76  Aurell, “Els discursos del poder,” 139.

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Unfortunately, neither the sword nor its scabbard have survived, but it is possible to find another similar insignia that, according to the documentation,77 was well known in Aragon and that could have also provided inspiration, namely the imperial sword Henry IV may have used in Rome in 1084 during his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor (Figure 9.6).78 The icono­g raphic similarities between both swords mean that they share a similar symbolic meaning. Henry IV tried to show through art a clear line of succession from Charlemagne down to his immediate successor, Henry III,79 and likewise Peter the Ceremonious used art to try and legitimize his conquest of Mallorca. Clearly the insignia of the sword, which had come to strongly represent the Crown of Aragon’s right of conquest during the reign of James I, was further enhanced as a symbol of sovereignty. Thus, by commissioning this ceremonial sword, Peter legitimized his unjustified annexation not only through an object that per se proclaimed his right of conquest, but also through an expressly chosen figurative resource. As we can see, the king used this insignia and the images engraved on it as a memorial tool to exhibit and also preserve memory of an 77  The first mention of this sword, also named espasa de sant Maurici, is found in a letter issued in 1315 by Isabella of Aragon, one of the daughters of James II and Blanche of Anjou, who married Frederick III of Habsburg. 78  Miquel Coll, Guifré el Pelós en la historiografia i en la llegenda (Barcelona, 1990), 136. 79  The German scabbard, now in the Kunst­histo­ risches Museum in Vienna, shows the raised effigies of fourteen emperors, all standing, from Charle­magne to Heinrich III: Hermann Fillitz, Die Insignien und Kleinodien des Heiligen Römischen Reiches (Vienna, 1954); Mechthild Schulze-Dörrlamm, Das Reichs­ schwert. Ein Herrschaftszeisen des Saliers Heinrich IV. und des Welfen Otto IV (Sigmaringen, 1995).

Figure 9.6: The Imperial Sword, eleventh century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (© KHM-Museumsverband, Wissenschaftliche Anstalt öffentlichen Rechts, Vienna).



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Figure 9.7: Pere Bernés, Ral of Peter the Ceremonious of Aragon and drawing in enamel on reliquary of St. George, fourteenth century. Valencia, Museo Catedral de Valencia (© Museo Catedral de Valencia).

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uninterrupted dynastic line and, therefore, to visualize his links with his most admired predecessor. Peter was obsessed with recovering royal domains that had been lost in the relatively near past. The importance he gave to the conquest is shown by the amount of space dedicated to this episode in his chronicle.80 The text states that the war had a just cause in that the king needed to defend the kingdom and his own authority. The king’s dynastic cult has already been studied and can be seen in several of his artistic commissions. The cult can also be observed in De vita moribus et regimine principum, which Peter the Ceremonious’s uncle, Peter of Aragon count of Ribagorza, wrote and gave to him while he was still infant.81 Because of the sword’s disappearance, we have no clear idea of the appearance of the enamels that covered its scabbard and that depicted the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon up to Peter the Ceremonious, the last member of the dynasty and the sword’s patron. Gauthier proposed that the closest example might be the lozenge panel by Pere Bernés situated above the altar in the cathedral of Girona showing images of saints.82 However, other icono­ graphic models for disseminating propaganda are frequently overlooked, the most obvious of these being coins. (Figure 9.7) After conquering Mallorca, Peter adopted existing practices and minted facing-head coins whose sides showed the bust of the crowned king. The work attributed to Pere Bernés offers other compositional elements that may also have been found on the ceremonial sword, such as the enamel of St. George, which decorated the reliquary containing the saint’s right arm. This image, which shows the saint standing upright, can be related to the imperial sword and other works closely connected to the monarchy, such as the ephemeral golden timbre of John I engraved

80  One third of the total: Homet, “El discurso polí�tico,” 100.

81  Ferran Valls i Taberner, “El tractat De Regimine Principum de l’infant Pere d’Aragó,” Estudis Franciscans 37 (1927): 271–287, 432–450; and 38 (1927): 107–119, 199–209. 82  Marie Madeleine Gauthier, Emaux du Moyen Âge (Fribourg, 1972), 240.

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Figure 9.8: Genealogy of Poblet, detail, ca. 1410. Poblet, Monastery of Saint Maria de Poblet (© Abadia de Poblet).

by Antoni Baster,83 or the later Genealogía de Poblet (Figure 9.8), dating from around 1409–1410.84

83  The king ordered its icono­graphy to be as follows: “the said gold coin be called the seal of Aragon and that it [must] have, on one side the image of our lord the king standing up dressed in royal Dalmatica, and with the crown on his head and in his right hand the sceptre and in the left the knob and there was no tabernacle or other works. And around it, the following text: Johannes dei gracia Rex Aragonum; And on the other part there be the stamp of the said lord king, with the royal seal below without any other work. And around it the following text: Apprehende arma et escutum et exsurge in adjutorium michi” (La dita moneda d’or sia apellada Timbres d’Aragó, e sia de la una part la ymatge del senyor Rey estant de peus vestit de dalmatica Reyalada, e tinent en lo cap la corona e en la ma dreta lo Ceptre e en la esquerra lo pom e noy haja tabernacle ne altres obres: E entorn sien les letres següents: Johannes dei gracia Rex Aragonum; E dela altra part sia lo Timbre del dit senyor Rey, ab la Targe Reyal deius, sens altres obres, E entorn sien les letres següents: Apprehende arma et escutum et exsurge in adjutorium michi). Cited from Joaquim Botet, Les monedes catalanes, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1976), 3:362 (document 41). 84  See, for example Amadeo Serra, “‘Ab recont de grans gestes.’ Sobre les imatges de la història i de



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The Laicization of Power and its Artistic Consequences

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that the right of primogeniture was sufficient for James I to govern without serious difficulties, despite the fact that he was never crowned in a formal coronation ceremony because of his refusal to become a vassal of the pope. Consequently, this meant there was no formal coronation ceremony that would demonstrate to his subjects, through ecclesiastical recognition, the link between royal power and the divine. The right of conquest was one of the tools the king could use to legitimize his control over his recently acquired lands, but this meant his authority was solely secular and did not have the backing of the church. As such, the links with divinity were non-existent, although the monarchy clearly desired to recover or to establish this connection with the sacred. It is significant, in my judgement, that this link is declared on the seals created by James after the conquests of Mallorca and Valencia, where the image of the king is surrounded for the first time by the term Dei gratia regis.85 It was of great importance to him to emphasize that, although his military victories were a result of his own successful efforts, they nevertheless enjoyed divine favour, as is stated in the aforementioned Four Great Chronicles, which constituted specific lieux de memoire86 of political power since the Carolingian period.87 However, how could he justify using this expression in the lands that he controlled through right of conquest, given the absence of church representatives when he acceded to the throne in these territories and considering the ambitious expansion policy of the Crown of Aragon? Given an undeniable sacred dimension to the war and the long Hispanic tradition of supposed divine intervention in Christian victories, it comes as no surprise that James should claim a miracle in the form of assistance from St. George powered his armies to conquer Mallorca and Valencia.88 As the emissary and representative of God, St. George’s holy assistance was clearly a way of sanctioning and giving divine approval to the authenticity and legitimacy of James’s right to govern these territories as king. Thus, the relationship between the monarchy and the divine was finally clearly established (Figure 9.9). la llegenda en la pintura gòtica de la Corona d’Aragó,” Afers. Fulls de Recerca i Pensament, 41, Art i Figuració a l’Edat Mitjana 17 (2002): 15–35.

85  This was common in diplomatic signatures: Felip Mateu, “‘Rex Aragonum.’ Notas sobre la intitulación real diplomática en la Corona de Aragón,” Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft. Herausgegeben von ihrem spanischen Kuratorium. Heindrich Finke (+), Wilhelm Neuss, Georg Schreiber. Gesammelte aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte spaniens 9 (1954): 130. 86  Concept first used in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols (Paris, 1984–92).

87  Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cam­b ridge, 1989) and Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cam­bridge, 2004).

88  St. George is also said to have participated in a previous battle: the conquest of Huesca, conducted by Pedro I (1094–1104). Nevertheless, the allusion to this miracle was included, for the first time, in the Crónica de San Juan de la Peña, written on the orders of Peter the Ceremonious between 1369 and 1372. Consequently, this divine assistance was not recorded in written form until after James I’s description of the conquests of Mallorca and Valencia in his Llibre dels feyts del rei en Jacme.

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Figure 9.9: Pere Nisart, Predella from the Altarpiece of St. George, detail, ca. 1470, Palma, Museu d’Art Sacre de Mallorca (© Museu d’Art Sacre de Mallorca, Palma).

This event is reflected in the predella of an altarpiece which the new Brotherhood of St. George89 commissioned from Pere Nisart in 1468.90 The anachronism of the urban surroundings has already been highlighted and explained in other studies, although the reference on the crest to the winged dragon has gone unnoticed; this was a para-heraldic element that appeared during the ill-fated reign of James III.91 Despite this artistic licence, Nisart reflected with surprising faithfulness the testimony given in the Llibre dels feyts,92 which states that when James entered Medinat Mayurqa, the battle was still 89  Formally instituted in 1460 by John II, although it is documented as existing from at least 1420: Gabriel Llompart, “Ideal caballeresco y escuela de esgrima en Mallorca en el siglo xv,” Jerónimo Zurita. Cuadernos de Historia 29–30 (1976–77): 149–62 at 151.

90  The contractual document has survived and is dated 1468. Josep Gudiol, Ars Hispaniae: Historia universal del arte hispánico. 9. Pintura gótica (Madrid, 1955), 295.

91  James III was the last independent king of Mallorca. This para-heraldic element is painted in one of the folios of the Lege Palatinae. For discussion on its adaptation in the kingdom of Aragon by Peter the Ceremonious, see Marta Serrano, “Influencias artí�sticas europeas en la cancillerí�a de la Corona de Aragón: algunos ejemplos de sigilografí�a,” in El intercambio artístico entre los reinos hispanos y las cortes europeas en la Baja Edad Media, ed. Marí�a C. Cosmen, Marí�a Victoria Herráez Ortega, and Marí�a Pellón Gómez-Calcerrada (Leon, 2009), 301–6.

92  “And according to what the Saracens told us, they said they saw entering first on horseback a white knight with blades; and is why we believe that it was St. George […]. And the Saracen numbers were so great, that the lances stopped them, because the horses, going there, could not pass for the density of the lances […] and the horses went in, which were between forty and fifty and the knights and men on foot who were behind their shields were soon near the Saracens and with swords they took care to wound each other” (E segons que els sarraï�ns nos contaren, deï�en que viren entrar primer a cavall un cavaller blanc ab armes blanques; e açò deu ésser nostra creença que fos sent Jordi […] E era tanta la multitud de la gent dels sarraï�ns, que els pararen les llances,



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Figure 9.10: Miquel Alcanyiç, Marçal de Sas, and other painters, altarpiece of Centenar de la Ploma, detail, ca. 1409–1410, London, Victoria and Albert Museum (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

in progress. For this reason, St. George appears not only at the side of the monarch but also at the side of his soldiers, who went on to form the militia of the brotherhood that commissioned the altarpiece. Gabriel Llompart93 has linked this painting to another by Miquel Alcanyiç, Marçal de Sas, and other painters from around 1400–1405,94 known as the Retablo del centenar de la ploma (Figure 9.10).95 One of its panels shows St. George assisting in the battle of the

e els cavalls dreçaren-se, per ço car no podien passar per la espessea de les llances […] e anaren entrant los cavalls, tant que, quan hi hac bé de quaranta tro a cinquanta e els cavallers e els hòmens de peu que hi eren escudats eren tan prop dels sarraï�ns que ab les espaes se cuidaven ferir los uns els altres). Cited from Jaume I, “Libre dels feyts,” 84 and 85. 93  Gabriel Llompart, La pintura medi­eval mallorquina. Su entorno cultural y su iconografía, 3 vols. (Palma, 1977), 3:148.

94  Matilde Miquel, “El gótico internacional en la ciudad de Valencia. El retablo de San Jorge del Centenar de la Ploma,” Goya 335 (2011): 191–213. 95  This was an infantry brotherhood instituted by a privilege granted by Peter the Ceremonious.

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Puig, thus enabling the king, according to the legend, to conquer Valencia. The Crónica de San Juan de la Peña is the first text to mention this divine assistance,96 although it also states that James did not participate in the battle,97 which means the king’s presence in the painting is a historical inaccuracy attributed by Amadeo Serra to the mythicization of James after his death.98 Furthermore, Joan Molina suggests that the unusual chivalric images of the holy king in Aragon strengthened James I and the monarchy in general,99 adding that the person who composed the images was conscious of the power of native legends, which can be greater than that of hagio­graphic writings.100 To this hypothesis, with which I agree, I would also add the role played by the monarchy, in particular James I and Peter the Ceremonious, in strengthening its own links with the divine. It should be remembered that Peter the Ceremonious stated in his chronicle that St. George placed the king’s battles under his protection,101 thus leading the king to regard the saint as the dynasty’s protector. Furthermore, the king sent embassies to try and obtain relics of the saint.102 As Aurell states,103 in the Middle Ages, all historical processes were dominated by divine providence; consequently, chroniclers and others used past events to explain Its name comes from the troops that helped James I to seize Valencia. Rafael Narbona, “Héroes, tumbas y santos. La conquista en las devociones de Valencia medi­eval,” Saitabí. Revista de la Facultad de Geografía e Historia de la Universidad de Valencia 46 (1996): 293–319 at 317.

96  “[N]ot only [did they] help him when there were battles with the Moors, they helped even more his vassals when they fought for him with the Moors; because it is said that as he had sent some nobles and knights in the kingdom of Valencia […] on a hill that is nowadays called Sancta Maria del Puig and all the Moors were against them in the battle, that was very spectacular, St. George appeared to them with many knights who helped them to win the battle, from which help no Christian died there” (non tan solament ayudavan a él quando aví�a batallas con los moros, mas encara ayudavan a sus vasallos quando por él se combatian con los moros; porque se dize que como él avies enviado algunos nobles et caballeros en el regno de Valencia […] en un pueyo qui agora es clamado Santa Marí�a del Puyg et toda la morisma vinies contra ellos en la batalla, qui entre ellos fue muyt gran, les apareció Sant Jorge con muytos cavalleros de parada qui los ayudó a vencer la batalla, por la qual ayuda ningún christiano no hi murió). Cited from Orcástegui, ed., Crónica de San Juan de la Peña, 93 (chap. 35, lines 230–239). 97  Also mentioned by Zurita, Anales de Aragón, 1:101 (book 3, chap. 27).

98  Serra, “Ab recont,” 25.

99  Powerful, popular, and now surrounded by a beatific halo. Joan Molina, “La ilustración de leyendas autóctonas: el santo y el territorio,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia. Revista de Ciencias Históricoeclesiásticas 70 (1997): 5–24. 100  Molina, “La ilustración de leyendas autóctonas,” 5.

101  “[A]nd to the blessed baron Saint George, who has always been and is an advocate of the battles of our House of Aragon” (e al benauriat baró sent Jordi, lo qual tots temps fo e és advocat de les batalles de la nostra Casa d’Aragó). Cited from Peter the Ceremonious, Crònica, 1115 (chap. 5, 17).

102  Joan Molina, “Sotto il segno d’Oriente. La monarchia catalano-aragonese e la ricerca del sacro nelle terre del levante mediterraneo,” in Representations of Power at the Mediterranean Borders of Europe (12th–14th centuries), ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner, Mirko Vagnoni, and Megan Welton (Florence, 2014), 71–90 at 80–84. 103  Aurell, “Els discursos del poder,” 146–47.



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and legitimize the political life of the present. So we find monarchical myth feeding off historical myth, which in turn fed into the sacralization of the monarchy. In this way, to activate the memory, to construct or reconstruct certain discourses that were intended to be transmitted to the future, those kinds of image already regarded as points of remembrance were recurrent and effective resources. The assertion of holy assistance had little repercussion in ecclesiastical circles perhaps because of the difficult relations between James I and the Church. After his conquests of Mallorca and Valencia, James considered himself to be king through right of conquest and to have no obligation to submit to anybody, including the pope. It makes sense that the Church, with its authority already marginalized, would not recognize the help given by St. George to the king during his conquests. Nevertheless, the icono­graphic evidence indicates that the miracle was celebrated throughout the fifteenth century; in addition to the aforementioned works, it can be seen in other pieces such as an altarpiece dedicated to St. George in Jérica (near Valencia), dating from about 1423,104 or the now lost piece painted on parchment by Gaspar Bonet in 1484.105 Space prevents me from going further into other techniques that the monarchy used to counteract the laicization of its power, which reached its peak during the reign of Peter the Ceremonious when he began a new period of royal propaganda involving the manipulation of his image as a means of governing and exercising power.106 The “Ordination of how the Kings of Aragon are Consecrated” makes clear, even at a figurative level, the autocratic character of a monarchy that eliminated anything that might tarnish its image. As Isidro Bango said, “The king had achieved his coronation in his own right and through his own effort, even though the church deprived him of being vicar of Christ and he would never again be an angel of God.”107 Although in the present study I cannot give the subject the detailed treatment it requires, it is no coincidence that the seals of the kings of Aragon should adopt religious references precisely after the creation of the Coronation Ceremony, which had the aim of linking the monarchy with the divine. Peter tried to keep the divine association alive, even if only visually. For it is no coincidence that the rites and ceremonies for the legal foundation of the government were held in religious spaces.108 All special rites (i.e., neither cyclical nor daily) had in common the fact that they exalted the bond between king and God, that is, the very sacredness of the religious building in turn conferred 104  This altarpiece has unfortunately been the victim of excessive restoration.

105  The only reference we have to this is provided by Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Joaquim Miret i Sans, “El Palau de la Diputació General de Catalunya,” Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans 3 (1909–10): 385–480. 106  See also À� ngel Sesma, “Pedro IV y la proyección de la imagen real en la Corona de Aragón,” in La construcción medi­eval de la memoria regia, 416.

107  El rey había conseguido coronarse por derecho propio y con su propio esfuerzo, sin embargo la iglesia le privaba de ser vicario de Cristo y nunca más volvería a ser ángel de Dios. Cited from Isidro Gonzalo Bango, ed., El rey, “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.” Maravillas de la España medi­ eval. Tesoro sagrado y monarquía (Leon, 2000), 29. 108  Homet, “El discurso polí�tico,” 103.

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sacredness on its contents. This argument links directly with the concept rex et sacerdos; crucially, at a time when he needed to strengthen his power over his nobles, the clergy, and his conquests, Peter the Ceremonious undertook a series of propagandistic measures to create an image of royalty with James I as its cornerstone.109 In this sense, to become fixed in memory, monarchical institutions knew their subjects needed first to be aware of the passage of time and second to be aware that something deserved to be remembered. Being conscious that transmission and survival are the two sides of the same coin,110 we have seen how monarchies did not hesitate to use icono­graphy as an effective tool for creating memory.

109  This issue is discussed in Flocel Sabaté, “Estamentos, soberaní�a y modelo polí�tico en la Cataluña Bajomedi­eval,” Aragón en la Edad Media 21 (2009): 245–78.

110  I am paraphrasing Hans Belting, Antropo­logía de la imagen (Buenos Aires, 2002), 74. Regarding memory and future, from the point of view of images, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. Histoire de l’Art et anachronisme des images (Paris, 2000). Regarding images as historical documents, see Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, 1993).

Chapter 10

ARCHITECTURE AND LEGACY IN MEDI­EVAL NAVARRE JAVIER MARTÍNEZ DE AGUIRRE

The magnificent tomb built by Johan Lome for Charles III the Noble and Eleanor of Castile, and intended for Pamplona Cathedral (1413–1419), was inscribed with an epitaph which starts at the back of the canopy of the sovereign and continues along the edge of the black stone slab on which the royal statues rest: Here lies, buried, Charles III (King) of Navarre and Duke of Nemoux, of good memory, descendent in direct line from the emperor St. Charlemagne and St. Louis, king of France; and who, in his time, recovered a great part of boroughs and castles of his kingdom which were in the hands of the king of Castile as well as his lands in France which were under the power of the kings of France and England. He, in his time, ennobled and exalted in dignities and honours many barons, knights, and noblemen who were his subjects; and he constructed many notable buildings in his kingdom; and he was very pious and merciful; and he reigned as king for thirty-eight years; and died on the eighth day of September of the year 1426.1

The text, in the form of a concise report, relates the king’s good deeds during his time on earth. It begins with his ancestry. Charles being descended “in a straight line” (en recta lignea) from two ancestors who embodied the medi­eval monarchical ideal, both powerful, both regarded as saints: The “emperador sant Karlos Magno” and St. Louis of France. Only five generations separated him from the latter (Louis IX being the great grandfather of Philippe of Evreux, who was Charles the Noble’s grandfather).2 It then tells of his 1  “†. Aquí� . iaze . . seppellido . el . de . [buena . ] memoria . don . karlos . iiiiº . [Rey] . de . navarra . et . duc . de nemoux . desdendient . en . recta . lignea . del . emperador . sant . karlos . magno . et . de . Sant loys . Rey . de . francia . Et . recobro . en . su . tempo . vna . grant . part . de . villas . et . castillos . de . su . regno . que . seyan . en . mano . del . re [y .] de . Castilla . et . sus . tierras . de . francia . que . seyan . empachadas . por . los . Reyes . de . francia . et . de . anglaterra . Este . en . su . tiempo . ennoblescio . et . exalco . en . dignidades . et . honnores . A . muchos . ricos . hombres . Cauailleros . et . fijos . dalgo . naturales . suyos . Et . fezo . muchos . notables . hedificios . en . su . regno . Et . fue . muy . piadoso . et . misericordioso Et . Regno . Rey . XXXVIII . aynnos . Et . fino . lo . viii . dia . de . septebre . del . aynno . de . mil . cccc . et xxvi.” We reproduce for the most part the transcript from R. Steven Janke, Jehan Lome y la escultura gótica posterior en Navarra (Pamplona, 1977), 59. 2  The exaltation of the progeny of St. Louis also appears in the chronicles of the time, such as that of Garci Lopez de Roncesvalles, which is discussed below: “the noble generation and the offspring of the noble kings of Navarre are direct descendents, through three different lines, of King St. Louis of

Javier Martínez de Aguirre ([email protected]) is Professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense, Madrid.

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foreign policy. This facet praises the restoration of the integrity of the kingdom thanks to the recovery of sovereignty in areas that had, in recent years, been controlled by the kings of France, England, and Castile. Thirdly, it tells of his achievements in domestic politics. This is summed up through the ennoblement of many knights, which shows the enormous disparity in mentality between those times and ours. The fourth assertion is the most significant for what interests us here, “et fezo muchos notables hedificios en su regno.” This highlights the positive way that Charles III was looked upon as a result of his encouragement of architectural works as a memorable legacy of his magnificent reign. In no other text from the abundant documentation, generated by the substantial number of building works commissioned by Charles III, can we read such a strong statement about the role that architectural endeavours played in the conception of the ideal of royalty. In the eyes of Charles III and his court, the great commissions generated pride in his entire life and, as such, should form part of the legacy of the person. This statement appears notably in the epitaph before the recognition of the religious virtues of the sovereign referred to in the fifth clause of the para­graph: he was “muy piadoso et misericordioso.” The inscription ends with two concluding, factual references, typical of historical compendia of the day: the length of his reign and the date of his death. In this chapter we shall consider how and when architectural commissions became so highly regarded in the kingdom of Navarre. And how and when did they start to become part of the legacy of the individual? It is difficult to answer the “hows” of both questions. As for the “whens,” it was certainly during the reign of Charles III (1387–1425) when architectural developments became considered an activity worthy of royalty, as a way of ennobling the kingdom and as a memorable activity for posterity, and worthy of mention within the concise bounds of an epitaph.3 The large amounts of money spent by Charles on building his palaces and Pamplona Cathedral, as well as direct control of the architectural work by the monarch, are clear proof of its importance.4 In parallel, but not unrelated, during Charles’s reign, efforts were made to create a flourishing historical memory of the kingdom, albeit a narrative focused on its rulers. But within these new historical accounts architectural endeavours increasingly took a prominent place. France” (la noble generación et lures criazones de los nobles reyes de Navarra [...] son descendidos por recta lí�nea, en tres partidas, del rey Sanct Loys de Francia). Cited from Carmen Orcástegui, ed., Crónica de Garci López de Roncesvalles. Estudio y edición crítica (Pamplona, 1977), 115–16.

3  In modern bio­graphies of Charles III, though his palaces are always mentioned, other notables hedificios are given less importance. In the voluminous and superbly documented mono­graph by José Ramón Castro(Carlos III el Noble, rey de Navarra [Pamplona, 1967]), the last section of the last chapter is headed “Carlos III, constructor” and comprises eighteen pages in a volume of more than six hundred and sixty.

4  Regarding the architectural endeavours of the king see Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre, Arte y monarquía en Navarra 1328–1425 (Pamplona, 1987).



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Buildings in Chronicles and Other Texts

Few local chronicles exist before the late fourteenth century. Among the oldest narratives, the Corónicas Navarras stand out.5 They date to a period between the primitive corpus of the Fuero General and its extension by Philippe of Evreux (1330). In the opinion of Antonio Ubieto Arteta, they were written between 1205 and 1209 using earlier texts. They mention no buildings, even when talking about the founding of new settlements or when referring to famous sepulchres.6 It was quite possible for a chronicler to mention construction of buildings. For instance, the Anales Compostelanos include the laying of the foundation stone of the church of Santo Domingo de la Calzada and the consecration of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.7 Other Navarrese literary works contemporary to the Corónicas do find room to praise building works. One is the descriptive–laudatory poem dedicated to the hospital of Roncesvalles. A copy of this work, composed in the early years of the thirteenth century, is kept in the codex called La Preciosa, in the archive of the actual collegiate church. It consists of 168 verses divided into forty-two goliardic rhymed stanzas of four verses. It follows what medi­eval authors termed a rhythm, and Ritmo de Roncesvalles 5  Antonio Ubieto Arteta, ed., Corónicas Navarras (Valencia, 1964), from two surviving codices, one in the General Archive of Navarre and another in the Cathedral Archive of Pamplona. The version from the Archivo Real y General de Navarra had been published previously in Pablo Ilarregui and Segundo Lapuerta, Fuero General de Navarra (Pamplona, 1869), 142–47. Naturally, the Genealogías de Roda, contained in a codex from the tenth century offers little information on the present discussion. 6  “In the year of the Hispanic Era 1123, King Don Sancho put people on Mount Aragon” (Era Mª. C. XX. III. aynos poblo Mont Aragon el rey don Sancho). Then, Ubieto Arteta, ed., Corónicas Navarras, 46: “In the Ides of July of AD 1253, Theoblad, most serene king of Navarre and count palatine of Campanie and Brie, of honourable memory, died near Pamplona, whose body received honourable burial in Pamplona, the erection of which attests and improves the place […]. On 11 Kalends of August in the year 1264 Henry, honourable king of Navarre and county palatine of Campanie and Brie of pious memory died, and his body received honourable burial in Pamplona, the erection of which attests and improves the place” (Anno Domini Mº. CCº. Lº. IIIº., VIIIº idus iulii, obiit apud Pampilonam dignus memoria Teobaldus, serenissimus rex Navarre et comes palazinus Campanie atque Brie, cuius corpus Pampilone conditum est honorifica sepultura, qui in elevatione sua forum iuravit et melioravit. […] Anno Domini Mº. CCº. LXXº. IIIIº., undecimo kalendas augustii, obiit apud Pampilona pie recordationis Henrricus, serenissimus rex Navarre et comes palatinus Campanie adque Brie, cuius corpus Pampilone nobili sepultura conditum requiescit, qui in elevatione sua forum iuravit et confirmavit). Cited from Ubieto Arteta, ed., Corónicas Navarras, 41. 7  “Roderic, bishop of Calahorra laid the first stone in the basement of the church of St. Dominic, Era 1196. Lord Roderic, bishop of Calahorra, with Abbot Lope, established the canons of St. Dominic. Era 1180. Archbihop P. Martinez consecrated the church of St. James, 11 Kalends of May in the Era 1249” (Rodericus Calagurritanus Episcopus posuit primum lapidem in fundamento Ecclesiae Sancti Dominici, Era MCXCVI. Dominus Rodericus Calagurritanus Episcopus una cum Lupo Abbate stabillit Canonicos Sancti Dominici. Era MCLXXX. Archiepiscopus P. Martinez consecravit Ecclesiam Beati Iacobi XI kal. Maii sub Era MCCXLIX). Cited from Enrique Flórez, ed., Continuación de las memorias de la Santa Iglesia de Tuy. 2ª Colección de los Chronicones pequeños, publicados, e inéditos, de la Historia de España, España sagrada. Teatro geográfico-histórico de la Iglesia de España 23 (Madrid, 1767), 322–23.

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is the name under which it is known in the recent study carried out by Antoni Peris.8 The poet twice referred to the construction of buildings. On the one hand, he dedicated some words to the memory of the bishop who founded the hospital, Sancho de Larrosa, and to the involvement of Alfonso I the Battler in its funding, specifying that, thanks to the impulse of these two, the foundations of the hospital building were initiated (“fieri hospitalis cepit fundamentum”). On the other hand, he wrote even more explicitly about the church of the pilgrims, the magnificent Gothic church which stands to this day. These documents provide an exact description of the building works by Sancho VII the Strong (1194–1234): But the very brave King of Navarre built here the church of the pilgrims and donated in perpetuity the sum of ten thousand, four hundred shillings. The daughter of the Emperor was the mother of this king, Sancho the Battler was his father, a very wise king, lover of all probity and conqueror of enemies.9

Nevertheless, it seems the reference to the sovereign is not only there to ensure his deeds are transmitted to posterity but also, especially, because his involvement contributed to extolling the institution the poet was praising. In contrast, the description of the chapel of the Holy Spirit, successful in both formal and utilitarian terms, included no mention of those who had promoted its construction (neither chapter, prior, nor individuals): Since it is intended for receiving the flesh of the dead, it is properly called a carnarium, from the word carne; it is often visited by a legion of angels, which is proved by the testimony of those who have heard them. In the middle of this church there is a magnificent altar to clean the impurities of the souls. The mystery dear to the King of Kings, and extremely bitter to the Prince of Darkness, is celebrated there. Pious St. James pilgrims, who piously visit Santiago carrying with them their offerings to the Apostle St. James, observe the ossuary structure and, bending their knees, praise and thank God.10

8  Antoni Peris, “El Ritmo de Roncesvalles: estudio y edición,” Cuadernos de Filo­logía Clásica. Estudios latinos 11 (1996): 171–209. The poem had been previously edited by Fidel Fita, “Roncesvalles. Poema histórico del siglo xiii,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 4 (1884): 172–77, and other scholars, including translations into French and Spanish. 9  “Verum strenuissimus uir, rex Nauarrorum / Construxit ecclesiam hic peregrinorum, / Eis decem milium prebens solidorum / Duraturos redditus et quadringentorum / Huius regis genuit matrem imperator / Pater eius extitit Sancius bellator / Rex sapientissimus, tocius amator / Probitatis, hostium erat et fugator.” Cited from Peris, “El ‘Ritmo de Roncesvalles’,” 205.

10  “Mortuorum carnibus eo quod aptatur, / A carne carnarium recte nuncupatur; / Angelorum agmine sepe uisitatur, / Ore audientium eos hoc probatur. / Est huius basilice medio preclarum /



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The mention of the commissioners and the poem itself are not typical in the local tradition and did not give rise to sequels.11 In the brief list of Navarrese medi­eval chronicles, the Genealogía de los reyes de Navarra stands out. As an appendix to his Crónica General de España, it was extended by the Augustinian Garcí�a de Eugui, Bishop of Bayonne and confessor to Charles II the Bad and Charles III the Noble.12 Although rather long, it is not as lengthy as most chronicles of those times. It contains just one reference to buildings, recorded in the reign of the third monarch, Sancho Abarca, who is said to have built several castles named after him: “he built some castles in the territory to fight against the Moors and gave them their names.”13 The validity of the statement may be found in a castle called Sancho Abarca in the Bardenas Reales (close to Tauste), an area near Tudela, on the border with AlAndalus until the twelfth century. It was traditionally said to have been built around 985. However, according to references in royal cartularies, to which Juan José Martinena drew attention, the castle had been built around 1220 by Sancho VII the Strong.14 References to buildings by Sancho Abarca appear in earlier chronicles written outside Navarre, and that formed the basis for local texts, such as De rebus Hispaniae by Jiménez de Rada and the Crónica de San Juan de la Peña.15 Altare contagia purgans animarum; / Fit ibi misterium regum Regi carum, / Tenebrarum principi nimis est amarum / Iacobite lacobum pie requirentes, / Sua secum lacobo munera ferentes, / Sepulture machinam circumspicientes, / Laudes Deo referunt genua flectentes.” Cited from Peris, “El ‘Ritmo de Roncesvalles’,” 205.

11  The eulogy of Pamplona (De laude Pampilone) included in the Codex of Roda (tenth century) informs us of architectural works (dimensions and constituent elements of the city walls, as well as the number of wells) but they are not linked to any particular historical figure. See José Marí�a Lacarra, “Textos navarros del Códice de Roda,” Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón 1 (1945): 193–283, esp. 267ff. 12  Carmen Orcástegui, “Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra de Garcí�a de Eugui,” Príncipe de Viana 39 (1978): 547–72.

13  “Fizo algunos castillos por la tierra por guerrear a moros et púsoles sus nombres.” Cited from Orcástegui, “Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra,” 559. 14  Juan José Martinena, Castillos reales de Navarra (Pamplona, 1994), 121.

15  “[A]nd he often built small forts on steep rocks and conquered many castles in open combat and via surprise attacks; […] he conquered many places in Celtiberia and Carpetania, which even today are referred to as of ‘King Sancho Abarca,’ and the king himself Sancho Abarca is remembered even today” (y construí�a a menudo fortines en las rocas escarpadas y conquistaba muchos castillos tanto en combates abiertos como con golpes de mano; […] conquistó multitud de lugares en Celtiberia y Carpetania, que aún hoy se conocen como “del rey Sancho Abarca,” y el propio rey Sancho Abarca es recordado aún hoy”). Cited from Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de los hechos de España, ed. Juan Fernández Valverde (Madrid, 1989), 214. “[H]e ordered many castles and fortresses built to hold back the Moors […] and conquered many places in Cantabria, among which there is one even today called Sancho Avarcha […]. This King Sancho Avarcha constructed many monasteries and churches, and was a great donor and benefactor of the Holy Monastery of San Juan de la Pena” (et fizo hy fer muytos castiellos et fuerças por costrennyr los moros […] et prendió muytos lugares en Cantabria, entre los quales lugares ni ha huoy uno clamado Sancho Avarcha […] Aquesti rey Sancho Avarcha edificó muytos monesterios et iglesias, et fizo muyto de bien al sancto monesterio de San Johan de

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The Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, written in 1405 by the treasurer of the kingdom of Navarre, Garci López de Roncesvalles, was conceived as a pro­logue to the volume of accounts for 1404. Its consonance with the concept of royalty which we saw in the epitaph of Charles III the Noble, can be seen from a comment on the first sovereign, Í�ñigo Arista, as he is praised as being “very good with arms and loved the noblemen” (muy bueno en armas et amó los fijosdalgo). Garci López includes two architectural items, both from the reign of Charles II, the last monarch he wrote about, whose deeds were then very recent. First, he talked of the building of the tribune for the reading of the Epistles and the Gospel in Pamplona Cathedral: And he ordered the rebuilding of the tribune where the Gospel and the Epistles were to be read, because the other was old and worn-out, and two altars to be raised underneath, and the king died before these works were accomplished, and his son Charles ordered them built and provided them with two silver chalices, missal book, and garments, with two painted arks, and other good works had to be done, but they remained undone because the church choir and much of the church collapsed at dawn on July 1 in AD 1390.16

The length the text devotes to what, at first sight, seems a topic as minor as the construction of a tribune, is striking, unless, as in my view, this contains a veiled justification for some, initially, small-scale works, but ones that eventually may have caused the collapse of the cathedral.17 The second item corresponds to the start of a commission that could not be completed: “this king, Charles, started building a college in Sancta Maria d’Uxue, and the works were conducted by Don Iohan d’Azanza, Abbot of Irach, but the building works stopped due to war.”18 Clearly, architectural activity was beginning to gain some importance in relation to building a legacy for the sovereign, but it still did not reach the level of significance that emerges from the epitaph of Charles III. It seems clear that Charles then had barely la Penna). Cited from Crónica de San Juan de la Peña (Versión aragonesa). Edición crítica, ed. Carmen Orcástegui (Zaragoza, 1986), 25–26.

16  “Et ordenó a refazer la tribuna do se leya el Evangelio et la Epistola porque la otra era vieja et consumada, et que de iuso fuesen dos altares, et morió el rey ante que fuesen fechas, et su fijo don Carlos los mandó fazer et los guarnió de dos calizes d’argent, libro misal et vestimentas, con dos arcas pintadas, et otros bienes tení�a de fazer que fincaron por la ocasion que el choro de la iglesia et grant partida cayó primero dia de julio al alba, anno Domini Mº CCCº XCº.” Cited from Orcástegui, “Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra,” 80.

17  Lately I have defended the idea that the partial collapse of the naves of the cathedral was caused by the weakening of the Romanesque pillars when these were used to support the new tribune the King had built in memory of his father: Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre, “El siglo XV en las catedrales de Pamplona y Palencia,” in La piedra postrera (1.) Ponencias. Simposium Internacional sobre la catedral de Sevilla en el contexto del Gótico Final, ed. Alfonso Jiménez Martí�n (Seville, 2007), 116–17. 18  Este rey don Carlos había empecados los edificios por un colegio de Sancta María d’Uxue et lo fazía fazer don Iohan d’Azanza, abbat de Irach, la qual obra cesó por la dicha guerra. Cited from Orcástegui, “Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra,” 92. On the intervention of Charles II in Ujué and particularly in this unfinished construction of which part of the perimeter walls survive, see Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre, “Arquitectura medi­eval,” in Santa María de Ujué (Pamplona, 2011), 107–11.



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begun his great building works, which acquired another level on his return from his first journey to Paris as king, between 1403 and 1406.19 It was during the second part of his reign, from the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1404 and especially after his return from his third visit to the French capital in 1411, when he imposed a new direction, marked by the desire for a court that would be comparable in refinement to that of his Valois relatives. The concise Genealogía latina de los reyes de Navarra, which Orcástegui dates from the time of Charles III (although it contains information, probably added in later copies, about John II) is in the same vein. The first monarch whose career it narrates, Sancho Abarca, gives rise to a comment like that mentioned by Garcí�a de Eugui: “this Sancho Abarca had greatly spread the kingdom of Navarre and had built castles under his name.”20 The text adds architectural references only in the case of Peter I, to whom it attributes the then existing cathedral (“Et iste hedifficavit ecclesiam Pampilone illam que nunc est”), clearly showing that this text was either composed before 1391 or is a copy, with no question, of an earlier text, since the Romanesque church, begun in the times of Peter I, had partially collapsed that year (which, as we have seen, Garci López de Roncesvalles mentioned). The idea that large constructions was an activity worthy of the monarchy and, as such, should be remembered, finds its best support in the Crónica del Príncipe de Viana, written in the mid-fifteenth century. The author, grandson of Charles III, had grown up in the court of his mother, Queen Blanche, who continued, as far as she could, the style of governance and the idea of royalty promoted by Charles III.21 In the pro­logue, Charles, Prince of Viana, calls upon the dignity of the kingdom he was destined to inherit: You, Navarre, not allowing the other Spanish nations to become equal to you as to the age of kingship or as to the successes and merits of faithful conquests or as to being worthy of your continuous loyalty or as to the good origin of the lordship of your own kings and lords.22

19  On the general artistic patronage, and especially architectural patronage of Charles III, in addition to what has been said in footnote 4, see Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre, “La rueda de la Fortuna: Carlos III el Noble de Navarra (1387–1425) en Parí�s, de rehén a promotor de las artes,” in El intercambio artístico entre los reinos hispanos y las cortes europeas en la Baja Edad Media, ed. Marí�a C. Cosmen, Marí�a Victoria Herráez Ortega, and Marí�a Pellón Gómez-Calcerrada (Leon, 2009), 379–405. 20  Hunc Sancium Abarca regnum Navarre plurimum dilatasse et castra sub nomine suo construixisse. Cited from Carmen Orcástegui, “Una Genealogí�a Latina de los reyes de Navarra,” in Homenaje a Don José María Lacarra de Miguel en su jubilación del profesorado (Zaragoza, 1977), 23–30.

21  For the artistic patronage of the Queen, see Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre, “El honor de la Corona: los encargos artí�sticos de la reina Blanca de Navarra,” Goya 334 (2011): 40–57. 22  “Tú, Navarra, no consentiendo que las otras nationes de Espanna se ygoalen contigo en la antiguidat de la dignidat real ni en el triumpho e merescimiento de fieles conquistas ni en la continua possession de tu acostumbrada lealdat ni en la original sennorí�a de tus siempre naturales reyes e sennores.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra del Príncipe de Viana. Estudio, Fuentes y Edición Crítica, ed. Carmen Orcástegui (Pamplona, 1978), 75.

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And almost simultaneously, he invokes the importance of a written record of its glories: And we, not wanting to make the mistake of our ancestors, who, we do not know why, wanted to leave no memories because they did not write anything of the great deeds of their kings; and even more with the pleasure of commemorating so excellent deeds done by those lords throughout their immense virtue, always reading and writing, we started and ended the present work.23

Thus, on one hand, the Prince of Viana proposed restoring the memory of his ancestors through writings. But at the same time, he bound his architectural activities to this record, understanding them as a part of the “excellent deeds” (excelentes fechos) deserving remembrance down the ages. In Chapter 5, which chronicles the first events in the Peninsula after the Moorish invasion, the Prince talks about Aragonese buildings: “this is why the Aragonese built large ramparts and fortresses to defend themselves against the fury and the hordes of the Moors ‘Abd al-Rahman and Aben Moncaravi Almanzor from Cordoba.”24 Then Chapter 6, dedicated to the reign of the first king of Navarre, Iñigo Arista, describes his role as founder and donor of the Monastery of Leyre, though it says nothing about its construction.25 In Chapter 9, dedicated to the second great sovereign in Navarre’s collective memory, Sancho Abarca, the Prince makes clear the link which, in his eyes, binds architecture to regal majesty, to the extent that construction of large buildings was a sign of both magnificence and piety. To this end, he used a passage taken directly from the Crónica de San Juan de la Peña, which is at the centre of the following extract: Certainly, he was a virtuous and zealous knight as well as a magnificent and catholic prince because he built many monasteries and churches, and made important donations to the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, and reigned for twenty-five years with great righteousness.26

Although no Navarrese text contains this comparison in these exact terms, the idea that a great Christian ruler (magniffico e catholico) had to build great buildings could be rooted in Old Testament paradigms. Solomon, one of the most distinguished models for a monarch, was not only the righteous king par excellence, but also the builder of the Great Temple of Jerusalem. 23  “Et nos, no sufriendo el herror de los pasados, los quoales no sabemos por quoal razon quisieron assí� dexar desiertas las memorias por no haver querido scrivir los grandes fechos de estos sus reyes, por ende nos, más delectandonos en comemorar los tan excelentes fechos que aquellos sennores con su inmensa virtud obraron, siempre leyendo e scribiendo, dimos comienço e fin en la obra presente.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 75.

24  “Por quanto los aragoneses fazí�an grandes vastidas e fortalezas donde se pudiessen defender de la furia e muchedumbre de los moros Abderramén e Aben Moncaravi Almançor de Cordova.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 94. 25  La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 99.

26  “Ciertamente assí� como fue virtuoso e esforcado caballero fue muy magniffico e cathólico prí�ncipe ca hedifficó muchos monesterios e yglesias e fizo señaladas mercedes al monesterio de Sant Johan de la Penna, e regnó XXV annos con grant justicia.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 105.



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The third outstanding monarch, Sancho III the Great, also received praise from Charles for his buildings: “furthermore, this very powerful king and lord made great foundations and reformed the churches and monasteries all over his lands.”27 And of his son Garcí�a el de Nájera, he remembers the building of the main church in the town, after which he was named: “don Ferrando ordered the burial of his brother Don Garcia in the monastery of Santa Maria de Nájera, which he had built.”28 Interestingly, the Prince of Viana linked the construction of the new Romanesque cathedral of Pamplona to King Sancho Ramirez, making him responsible for the reform of the see and the introduction of the Gregorian reform through Bishop Pedro de Roda. However, other documents refer to his personal involvement in the building of the cathedral (which, according to some documentary sources, can be attributed to the reign of his son, Peter I): This blessed king not only carried out acts of war, but he also wanted, for the honour of the eternal and sovereign king, to grant privileges to His sacred churches and monasteries, and especially, the cathedral church of Pamplona and the monastery of San Salvador de Leyre, which used to be the head of the bishopric of Navarre due to the loss of the cathedral of Pamplona, which for a long time was occupied by Muslims; and even though King Sancho the Great, in the council he held, ordered that the See be repaired, he could not carry it out because he was very busy and did not live long. For this reason, King Sancho Ramirez ordered and demanded Bishop Sancho, from Aragon, to rebuild the aforementioned cathedral of Pamplona, and he granted it many privileges.29

With this sovereign, for the first time we find a chapter headed by a text involving buildings: “Chapter three, which tells of the conquests he made, the buildings he raised, and the way he died.”30 The text states that “this king built the monastery of Mont Aragón and the canonries of Jaca and Fanlo.”31 In the Middle Ages the verb “to build” was used as a synonym for “to construct,” but also for “to found,” so we cannot always be sure about the sense that each writer meant. This information on the colegio of Jaca and 27  “Otrossí� este muy poderoso rey e señor fizo grandes fundaciones e reformó las yglesias e monesterios de todos sus sennorios.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 111.

28  “Don Ferrando mandó enterrar a su hermano don Garcí�a en el monesterio de Sancta Marí�a de Nágera, el quoal él fizo fazer.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 114.

29  “No tan solamente este bien aventurado rey entendió en fechos de guerra mas ahun quiso a honor del soberano e eternal rey previlegiar sus sanctas yglesias e monesterios e singularmente a la iglesia catedral de Pomplona e al monesterio de Sant Salvador de Leyre, el quoal solí�a ser cabeça del obispado de Navarra por el dirruymiento de la Seu de Pomplona que fue largos tiempos ocupada por los moros; e no embargante que el rey don Sancho el Mayor hubiesse hordenado en el concillio que celebró, que la Seu fuesse reparada, no ubo efecto por la ocupación e brevedad de sus dí�as. Por ende, este rey don Sancho Remiriz mandó e rogó al obispo don Sancho, natural de Aragón, que rehedifficasse la dicha Seu de Pomplona e le octorgó para ellos sus grandes e muchos privilegios.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 120. 30  “Capí�tulo tercero el quoal narra las conquistas que fizo e qué edifficó e cómo murió.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 124. 31  “El dicho rey hedifficó el monesterio de Mont Aragón e el colegio de Jaca e de Fanlo.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui 124.

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Fanlo had already appeared in the Crónica de San Juan de la Peña. Later, the text reads, “in the year 1091, he built El Castellar above Zaragoza […] and built Loarre and the Castle of Marcuelo and Alquezar.”32 Interestingly, Peter I is also credited with the construction of Pamplona cathedral33 for which, in contrast, we have no additional documentary references. Further on, there is no shortage of references to constructions by the Cid34 as well as a very curious mention of the building of a church in Zaragoza by the Navarrese soldiers who conquered the city as part of the first group of attackers who crossed the city walls.35 In the Prince of Viana’s opinion, the Navarrese monarch who stands out for his greatest interest in religious buildings was Sancho VII the Strong (1194–1234). He was buried in the church of Roncesvalles that he had founded (he refers to the Gothic church, not the hospital about which he had previously spoken when describing the reign of Garcia Ramirez) and built the following: […] the cathedral of Tudela and the bridge, and then he brought the Ebro from Mirapeix to pass through it; he built the monasteries of Fitero and La Oliba, and constructed the bridge, and raised the walls of Logrono, and built the castles of Fontarrabia and San Sebastian, and raised the walls of Vitoria, and constructed the castle of Trevino, and raised the walls of Lagoarda and built other large buildings.36

In contrast, his successor, Theobald I was only credited with the castle of Tiebas,37 while the surviving documents link it to his son, Theobald II. Of the Capetian kings who wore, simultaneously, the crowns of France and Navarre, Charles only mentioned the works commissioned by Philippe IV the Fair who, he said, “raised the great palace in Paris.”38 32  “En el aynno de MXCI edifficó el Castellar sobre Caragoça […] e hedifficó Loarre e el castillo de Marcuelo e Alqueçar.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 125.

33  “E edifficó la iglesia de Pomplona.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 134.

34  “He built a large fortress on a rock, which now is called the Rock of the Cid” (Fizo una fortaleza grande en una penna, la quoal agora es llamada la Penna del Cid). Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 131.

35  Alfonso I conquered the city of Zaragoza “and the first who entered it were the Navarrese through a wicket they made in the fence, and they built a church called Sant Miguel de los Navarros” (e los primeros que en ella entraron fueron los navarros por hun portillo que fizieron en la cerqua, e hedifficaron ende una iglesia que se llama Sant Miguel de los Navarros). Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 135. We also learn valuable information on building regulations for houses in Pamplona, prompted by the clash between burghers (La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 161), and defensive buildings that led to the so-called War of the Navarrerí�a (1276): La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 177.

36  “La Seu de Tudela e la puente e truxo Ebro de Mirapeix a pasar por ella; hedifficó los monesterios de Fitero e de La Oliba e fizo la puente, e cerquó la ciudat de Logrono, e fizo los castillos de Fontarrabí�a e de Sant Sebastián, e cerquó la ciudat de Victoria, e fizo el castillo de Trevino, e cerquó Lagoarda e fizo otros grandes hedifficios.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 162. 37  “This king built the castle of Tiebas and he was very rich” (Este rey fizo el castillo de Tiebas e hera muy rico). Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 165.

38  “Fabricó el gran palays de Parí�s.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 189.



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Concerning the House of Evreux, the Prince recorded the involvement of Charles II in Ujué, in terms very similar to those used by Garci López de Roncesvalles: “And this King Charles had started the building of a college in Sancta Maria de Uxue, and Don Johan de Acanca, Abbot of Yrach, was commissioned to build it, but works stopped due to the aforementioned war.”39 However, as his writings go no further than where his predecessors stopped in their chronicles, we miss his view of the architectural works by his grandfather Charles III, which is particularly regrettable. The heightened interest in large architectural projects worthy of remembrance and as an expression of royal magnificence seems to have been a passing phase, since it disappeared from later local chronicles, even those by authors who were part of the royal circle. The Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra written by the royal adviser Juan de Jaso, for instance, which lacks references in this regard, does nevertheless attach particular importance to the description of the coats of arms of the kings, whether real or imaginary (in other words, attributing arms to those who reigned before the heraldic system took shape).40 We might wonder: did this high esteem in which buildings were held extend beyond the circle of the royal family? Did his contemporaries see the buildings erected by Charles III as notable, that is, worthy of renown, and did they see them as part of his legacy? We can answer the first part of the question affirmatively, or at least the sovereigns did everything they could to gain esteem for the buildings. We have evidence of Queen Blanche’s interest in organizing visits by ambassadors from other countries to the palaces in Olite, Tafalla, and Pamplona, where they spent whole days getting to know them.41 However, we do not know to what extent the fame of the deceased sovereign, who had them built, benefited from the admiration of visitors. 39  “E este rey don Carlos habí�a conmencado a hedifficar hun collegio en Sancta Marí�a de Uxue e tení�a cargo de esta obra don Iohan de Acanca abbat de Yrach e cessó por la dicha guerra.” Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 206. One version of the chronicle copied almost verbatim the reference to the tribune that Charles II had built in the cathedral; borrowed from Garci López in Roncesvalles: “This king ordered the building of the tribune where the gospel and the epistles were to be read, because the other was old and worn-out, and two altars to be raised; and the king died before these works were finished, and his son Charles ordered their building and then to provide them with two silver chalices, missal book, garments, with two painted arks” (Este rey ordenó de fazer la tribuna do se leya el evangelio y epí�stola porque la otra estaba ya bieya consumida, e que de suso fuesen dos altares; e morió el rey antes que fuesen fechos, e su fijo don Carlos los mandó fazer los guoarnió de dos calices d’argent, misal, vestimentos con sus arquas dos pintadas). Cited from La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, ed. Orcástegui, 232. 40  Fidel Fita, “El Dr. D. Juan de Jaso, padre de San Francisco Javier. Su Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra,” Boletín de la Academia de la Historia 34 (1894): 129–48.

41  On November 18, 1432, they regaled the knight Monsignor John de Bourbon with a dinner in Tafalla, “who came to watch our palaces” (el quoal fue a mirar nuestros dichos palacios); cited from Florencio Idoate, Archivo General de Navarra. Catálogo de la Sección de Comptos. Documentos (Pamplona, 1965–1970), 40: 268 (document 720). In 1435 ambassadors sent to Olite by the count of Foix to arrange the marriage of the count’s son with the Princess Eleanor: “were looking at the palaces of this town all day long” (estouieron por mirar los pallacios de la dicha villa por todo el dí�a), and later they marched in procession to Ujué: Idoate, Archivo General de Navarra. Catálogo, 42: 27 (document 57) and 28 (document 60). On April 4, 1435, Juan de Marcilla, jurist from

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Buildings and Legacy-Making

Let us now turn our attention to aspects of buildings themselves that promoted one’s legacy. From pre-Romanesque times, epi­graphs on tombstones, capitals, or mural paintings within large (or modest) constructions were not unusual. They named the patrons/ commissioners or creators, sometimes accompanied by figurative depictions of them. The capitals of the Chapel of the Salvador in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral or the lintel of the Pórtico de la Gloria are well-known cases. In some examples, such as San Cugat del Vallés (Barcelona), the wording of the inscription suggests that the building was meant to last forever.42 A name accompanied by the common me fecit / hoc fecit was enough to record the involvement of a particular individual. In Navarre, the well-known “Leodegarius me fecit” on the façade of Santa Maria in Sangüesa is accompanied by the “Sancius me fecit” in Azuelo, the “Petrus me fecit” in Guerguitiáin, or the inscriptions of “Fulcherius” and “Azenar” in Leyre, to cite several Romanesque examples. Nonetheless, it is difficult to gauge, except in cases like that of San Cugat, when work and name were joined with the intention of their endurance in the long-term or if they did so primarily to advertise themselves to their contemporaries. This is one of the most difficult issues to clarify in relation to the explicit desire to create individual legacies through architecture. Perhaps displaying the identity of the builders through inscriptions or other means always took into account both the present and the future, but it is less clear which might prevail in the minds of the commissioners. All architecture was carried out for the present. Some include elements pointing to eternity (Egyptian houses built to remain permanent for millions of years). Their continuity for future generations depended on the nature of the materials used, the quality of the work, and the unpredictability of time.43 In medi­eval Navarre, we have no evidence to decide if both present and future were taken into consideration. The first inscription which records a commissioner of medi­eval architecture in the Pyrenean kingdom is now in the Museum of Navarre. It comes from San Miguel de Villatuerta and accompanied a rich set of reliefs adorning the exterior of the hermitage. In the transcription by Germán de Pamplona, the main text reads:44 Zaragoza “went to look at our palaces in Tafalla.” Idoate, Archivo General de Navarra. Catálogo, 42: 95 (document 243). In 1437, a knight from Barcelona, Juan Luis de Galbe, came to Tafalla “to look at the palaces of this town” (a mirar los palacios de la dicha villa), and continued to Pamplona “to have a look at this city” (por mirar la dicha ciudat): Idoate, Archivo General de Navarra. Catálogo, 43: 44 (documents 99 and 100) and 55 (document 129). 42  Next to the figure of the artist carving a capital, one can read: HEC EST ARNALLI / SCULPTORIS FORMA CATELLI / QUI CLAUSTRUM TALE / CONSTRUXIT PERPETUALE.

43  In the way medi­eval people viewed time, the future had two phases: the earthly and the one following the end of time. We are not interested here in this second future, for which, on the other hand, a good number of architectural commissions were carried out, since the construction of religious buildings was considered a merit for the judgement that all individuals had to pass before God. In this sense, it was part of almsgiving and, according to some twelfth-century texts, belonged to the highest rank of these. The field of memory belongs to the earthly world. 44  Germán de Pamplona, “La fecha de la construcción de San Miguel de Villatuerta, y las derivaciones de su nueva crono­logí�a,” Príncipe de Viana 15 (1954): 221–35 at 221. Earlier readings



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INMNE DNI NSI IHV XPI SCI MIKAEL DNO BLASCIO DNO SANCIO ACTO NOMEN MAG ESTR[…] FECIT. BELENGERES SCRIPSIT

It is accompanied on the top of the tombstone by another text in smaller characters: INDE… SVO DNI SCI MIKAEL DNO SANCIO IM[peranti]

Unfortunately, in two different periods, both a king named Sancho and a bishop of Pamplona called Belasco coincided, so the identity of the people mentioned is unclear. They could be either Sancho II Abarca or Sancho IV of Peñalén and one of the two prelates called Blasco or Velasco who ruled the Pamplona diocese in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Germán de Pamplona provided arguments to conclude that they are those of the tenth century (Biurrun, Gudiol, and Lacarra preferred those of the eleventh century). Since the dedication of the church and the choice of subjects depicted in the reliefs may be adequately explained by the wars of Sancho Abarca, we cannot conclude that the inscription was made with the main intention of guaranteeing the legacy of both the monarch and the bishop.45 This promising start to monumental inscriptions had no immediate sequels. Navarrese monarchs are barely mentioned in epi­graphs from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It suffices to mention the brief reference to the donation of a vineyard by Garcí�a Ramí�rez the Restorer on the tympanum from San Lazaro of Estella (in the Museum of Navarra): IN DEI NOMINE AMEN: GARCIA REX DEDIT ISTAN VINEAN PRO SUA ANIMA.

However, this does not specify the intervention of the king in the building, which, in addition, has disappeared. On the other hand, the chrismon contains another text, which clearly shows who had made it: IN [NOMI]NE PATRIS ET FILII ET (SPIRITUI) S[AN]CTI AMEN ALDEBERTUS ME FECIT.46

It is not until the thirteenth century that we find mention of Theobald II of Champagne on a tombstone next to the door of the convent of San Francisco in Sangüesa, testament to his role as founder of the church: ANNO DOMINI M.CC.LV.VI TEOBAL(DUS) SECUND(US) ILLUS TRISIM(US) REX NAVARRAE IN DI

by Biurrun and Gudiol are included. The most recent review is Marta Poza Yagüe, “El conjunto relicario de San Miguel de Villatuerta,” in Sancho el Mayor y sus herederos. El linaje que europeizó los reinos hispanos, ed. Isidro G. Bango Torviso, 2 vols. (Pamplona, 2006), 2:609–27.

45  A contextualization of San Miguel de Villatuerta in the context of armed conflicts in the second half of the tenth century can be found in Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre, “Creación de imágenes al servicio de la monarquí�a,” in Signos de identidad histórica para Navarra, ed. Á� ngel J. Martí�n Duque, 2 vols. (Pamplona, 1996), 1:187–202, esp. 195–99. 46  The most recent publication on the tympanum is Carlos Martí�n ez Á� lava, “Otras piezas románicas,” in Enciclopedia del Románico en Navarra, 3 vols. (Aguilar de Campoo, 2008), 2:1113–14.

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E LUCAE EVANGELISTAE FUNDAVIT HANC ECCLESIAM. OBIIT D(OMNUS) P(ETRUS) X(IMENEZ) DE GAZOLAZ EP(ISCOPUS) PAMP(ILONENSIS)47

It has its equivalent in the presence of the shield of King Theobald II on the inner and outer walls of the church of Santo Domingo in Estella.48 By then emblems were already frequently used, either as coats of arms (with shield) or merely as signs to establish a permanent visual link between the patron and the observer which endured as long as the building existed. The oldest examples correspond to the second half of the twelfth century. By this time, the equines of Santa Maria in Tudela, on capitals belonging to the second phase of the late Romanesque period and which most likely identify the Baldoví�n family, had appeared. These figures still did not differ from others used for ornamental purposes, so it is difficult to ascertain their emblematic intentions. This would apply, for example, to the eagle that crowns a keystone in the Cistercian monastery of La Oliva, most likely included as a testament to the funding by Sancho VII the Strong, which we have already seen chronicled by the Prince of Viana.49 Shields with the arms of the promoters have a clearer intent, because their only possible purpose is to link the bearer of the arms to the building work. The oldest accurately dated example, in fact the first monumental depiction of the arms of the king of Navarre within the kingdom, is found on the western pillars of Tudela Cathedral, where emblems, recently created by Theobald I of Champagne after his accession to the throne, were carved and polychromed. The presence of a pair of shields painted on the arch that separates the naves, which rests on the newly built pillar, certifies that there was interest in showing where the new monarch’s contribution to the building had started.50 The visual depiction of the identity of patrons of buildings through the inclusion of shields carved in stone or painted on the walls, windows, keystones, and so on, spread throughout the West in the thirteenth century. Navarre was no exception and, given that several examples have already been thoroughly studied, there is no reason to list them here.51 I only highlight one of the most significant examples due to its relevance to the subject in question here. The Romanesque cathedral of Pamplona partially collapsed in the late fourteenth century and this affected the sections of the central nave where the canons’ choir was 47  Maria Concepción Garcí�a Gainza, Mercedes Orbe, and Asunción Domeño, Catálogo Monu­mental de Navarra. IV. Merindad de Sangüesa. Jaurrieta–Yesa (Pamplona, 1992), 397. 48  Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre and Faustino Menéndez Pidal, Emblemas heráldicos en el arte medi­eval navarro (Pamplona, 1996), 159–60.

49  On the use of the eagle symbol by Sancho VII the Strong, see Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre, “El signo del águila en los documentos de Sancho VII el Fuerte, rey de Navarra (1194–1234),” Anales de la Real Academia Matritense de Heráldica y Genealogía 8, no. 2 (2004): 557–74.

50  Javier Martí�nez de Aguirre, “Arquitectura medi­eval,” in La catedral de Tudela (Pamplona, 2006), 158–89, esp. 178–83.

51  Those identified up to 1996 can be found in: Martí�nez de Aguirre, Menéndez Pidal, Emblemas heráldicos. Other examples have already been located.



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located. It was quickly agreed to replace the ruined parts with a new construction in line with the architecture of the time. This subsequently led to a full replacement of the old Romanesque building, of which today only some fragments remain. The first stone of the new building was laid in a ceremony in May 1394.52 The three authorities involved in the reconstruction, the council, the bishop, and the king, left proof of their participation with the inclusion of figurative elements on the inner faces of the four pillars that made up the first section of the nave, where the new canons’ choir was to be built.53 The arms of Charles III the Noble appear twice on the pillars of the toral arches, the most important ones, which is no surprise, since the funds he contributed and his determination in times of crisis ensured the continuity of the works. Another pillar shows the coat of arms of Bishop Martin de Zalba with a cardinal’s hat. Perhaps the most surprising is the presence of a relief showing a group of canons kneeling before the standing figure of the Madonna with the baby Jesus in her arms; this testifies to the contribution of the chapter members. An inscription confirms this: CAPITULUM ECCLESIE PAMPILONENSIS ANNO MCCCXCIIIIº54

The seals of the chapter of Pamplona Cathedral from 1291 to 1497 often included the portrayal of clergy praying before the image of the Virgin and Child.55 So, this relief is equivalent, from the emblematic point of view, to the coats of arms used by the king and the bishop. In the thirteenth century, castles named after their patrons appeared in Navarre. We have already discussed the case of the castle of Sancho Abarca. The list of Navarrese royal fortresses also includes the castle of Belmerches in Estella, built by the governor Eustache Beaumarchais (1275–1277) to commemorate his participation in the War of the Navarrerí�a in Pamplona (1276), and the castle of Castelrenaut, in Ultrapuertos, erected in 1341 by governor Renaud de Pont (1339–1343) to guard against raids by the Souletins and Bearnais on the northern border of the kingdom. Castelrenaut suggests a special craving for notoriety by its promoter. Highly illustrative documentation about this has survived. The ordinances of Ultrapuertos of 1341, handed down by the governor, state that its construction was motivated by misdeeds committed near Oserain by the chatelaine of Mauleon against passing Castilian merchants. The governor would be remembered forever thanks to the castle’s name, apparently. At the same time, a petition for a second fortress to be built in the same district was submitted by the inhabitants of La Bastide-Clairence, and others, to protect merchants on their way from Saint-Jean-

52  José Zunzunegui, El reino de Navarra y su obispado de Pamplona durante la primera época del Cisma de Occidente (San Sebastian, 1942), 289 (document 3). 53  Martí�nez de Aguirre, Menéndez Pidal, Emblemas heráldicos, 236–37; Martí�nez de Aguirre, “Arquitectura medi­eval,” 158–89, esp. 178–83.

54  José Esteban Uranga, “Una fecha en la construcción de la catedral de Pamplona,” Príncipe de Viana 4 (1943): 165. There are beautiful photo­graphs of the coats of arms and a study of the process of building the cathedral in: Carmen Jusué, ed., La catedral de Pamplona, 2 vols. (Pamplona, 1994). 55  Faustino Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, Mikel Ramos Aguirre, Esperanza Ochoa de Olza Eguiraun, Sellos medi­evales de Navarra: Estudio y corpus descriptivo (Pamplona, 1995), 884–85.

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Pied-de-Port to Bayonne. Fortún believes, however, that the final decision was taken for defensive reasons, to protect the kingdom.56 The initial plan envisaged the construction of a bastide (fortified town). To this end, the governor granted land to settlers on behalf of the sovereign. Its name would be Pont. The bastide failed to prosper, unlike the castle. We see, at least in this case, an authority below the king (when the king was absent) wanting to link, on two occasions, his name to enduring constructions, a town and a fortress, although only one of them came to fruition.

Memory and Architectural Forms: Some Reflections

May we now consider the question of how commemorative buildings, whose forms consciously transmitted a meaningful content, such as those evoking the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (that is, Church of the Resurrection or the Church of the Anastasis), were conceived in terms of visual remembrance. In my opinion, remembrance, the memory of a place someone has occupied and filled with personal meaning, is not at their heart. They do not look to the past. Their significant aspect is spatial, not temporal. They divert the faithful towards another place (as we see in the circular Anastasis form’s increasing prevalence in the Western Church) or forward, towards the entry of the soul into the Kingdom of Heaven. Of course, religious buildings built to commemorate an individual would have been a resounding failure. The three churches built in Navarrese Romanesque, whose forms and purpose are primarily funerary (the Holy Sepulchre in Torres del Rio, Santa Maria in Eunate, and the Chapel of the Holy Spirit in Roncesvalles), are also linked by the fact that we do not know who commissioned them.

56  “Due to people’s clamour, he ordered a fortress to be built at that place, at the top of the hill from where the said place of Ossaraynn was clearly visible, which would be guarded by the sergeant Urtungo de Ganaverro, and that a village shoud be congregated there and named Castel Renaut. […] Furthermore, because of the petition from La Bastide-Clairence’s inhabitants, saying that it should be commanded so that merchants, muleteers, and those who go to the place of Bayonne and come from there could travel safely to the aforesaid place of Saint Jean Pied de Port, also at the request of noblemen, “francs,” and farmers, he ordered a bastide to be built in the middle of the road between those places in the deserted hills and places from which the king obtained small profit, and in the future it would be allocated to God’s and the Lord’s service. And those lands would be given to the inhabitants (of said bastide) in the aforementioned manner, to noblemen in exchange of tribute and to the rest in exchange of perpetual ground rent. This bastide shall be called Pons and be guarded by Pedro Sáchez de Lizarazu, the aforesaid bailiff of La Bastide-Clairence” (Ad clamoren gentium ordinauit quod in dicto loco in summitate montis unde dictus locus de Ossaraynn valde bene uideri prout quod unum fiat fortalicium, quod custodet Vrtungo de Ganauerro serviens armorum et contraetur ibí�dem populatio quod uocabitur Castel Renaut. […] Item, ad supplicationem et requesitionem Gentium dicte bastide dicentium quod ordinaretur taliter quod mercatores, muliones et qui incedunt ad locum de Baiona et reueniunt inde possent transire secure ad dictum locum Sancti Johannis de Pede Portus, etiam ad requisitionem generosum, francorum et laboratorum predictorum, ordinauit quod de nuo fiat bastida in medio uie dictorum locorum in montibus et locis desertis vnde dominus rex modicum habet proficium et in futurum habebit ad Dei et sui seruicium. Et quod habitantoribus dentur terre in forma predicta, generosis ad tributum et ceteris ad censsum perpetuum. Hec bastida uocabitur Pons et custodietur per Petrum Sancii de Licaraçu, baiulum dicte bastide de Clarencia). Cited from Luis Javier Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, “Las Ordenanzas de Ultrapuertos de 1341,” Príncipe de Viana 42 (1981): 265–74, esp. 272 and 274, n. 5 and 10.



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It is curious to note that the earliest mentions of the hospital of Roncesvalles relate it to events of which more literary than historical references have survived, like Roland’s death and Charlemagne’s prayers. None of this was important to those who, in the early thirteenth century, wrote the poem of praise previously mentioned, according to Peris due to the demands of the genre.57 Today, we are unable to locate the rock split by Roland’s sword, Durandal, over which the church is said to have been built, as described in the Liber Sancti Iacobi.58 And finally, we might pose the question of whether any of the reconstruction projects in the Romanesque or Gothic periods were carried out with a desire, somehow, to commemorate the building that it replaced. Perhaps the small Romanesque chapel within San Miguel of Aralar was intended to preserve the dimensions and location of an earlier building, but this hypothesis, proposed by Francisco Iñiguez, has yet to be confirmed.59 A tradition survives today of a hole in its front wall to communicate with the cave of a legendary dragon. Of course, elements preserved for purely practical purposes, such as undemolished apses of earlier churches, Romanesque towers to which Gothic buildings were added, walls, surviving stairs, and doorways, are a different matter. On the south wall of the transept of the cathedral in Pamplona, there are three keystones encrusted, with inscriptions on the border. The one depicting the Annunciation contains the text of the Ave Maria. The inscription on the central keystone is a fragmentary reproduction of the acclamation Christus vincit. The third inscription is a memorial to commemorate a deceased prelate which, according to Vengoechea, reads: HIC : JACET : …. MICHAEL : PETRI : DE : LEGARIA : BON… MEMORIAE : EPIS : PAMP …LON…

57  Peris, “El ritmo de Roncesvalles,” 184.

58  The seventh chapter of the fifth book of the Liber Sancti Iacobi provides a brief description of Roncesvalles. Already by then (the second quarter of the twelfth century), some milestones of the Chanson de Roland had been located in the landscape: “Next to this mountain, northbound, lies the valley called Valcarlos, where Charlemagne himself encamped with his armies, when his warriors died in Roncevaux. Many pilgrims pass through it, on their way to Santiago, when they do not want to climb the mount. Then, on the descent, you find the hospital and the church where the rock that the very powerful hero Roland cut in half from top to bottom with three blows of his sword. Then comes Roncevaux, where the great battle, in which King Marsile, Roland, and Oliveros perished with forty thousand other Christian and Saracen fighters, took place” (Junto a este monte, en dirección norte, está el valle llamado Valcarlos, en el que acampó el mismo Carlomagno con sus ejércitos, cuando sus guerreros murieron en Roncesvalles. Por él pasan también muchos peregrinos camino de Santiago cuando no quieren escalar el monte. A continuación, en la bajada, están el hospital y la iglesia en la que se encuentra el peñasco que el poderosí�simo héroe Roldán, con su espada partió por medio de arriba abajo, de tres golpes. Viene luego Roncesvalles, el lugar donde tuvo lugar el gran combate en el que perecieron el rey Marsilio, Roldán y Oliveros con otros cuarenta mil combatientes cristianos y sarracenos). The eighth chapter relates that “upon the rock of Roncevaux” (sobre un peñasco de Roncesvalles) which Roland cut in two with three blows of his sword, “a church rises.” (se levanta una iglesia). Cited from Millán Bravo Lozano, ed., Guía del peregrino medi­eval (Codex Calixtinus) (Sahagun, 1989), 35 and 65. 59  In this regard, see José Esteban Uranga Galdiano and Francisco Í�ñiguez Almech, Arte medieval navarro, 5 vols. (Pamplona, 1971), 1:84–86.

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Accordingly, I interpret the three keystones as coming from the ancient sepulchre of the prelate, which apparently was in the vicinity of the southern transept.60 The relief bears the image of the prelate, with mitre and a staff, in the act of blessing. He is flanked by two young clerics. Neither in form nor in dimensions do they match elements of the sepulchres we know from that time. They might come from a funeral chapel about which we have no information, or from the architectural setting of a sepulchre in the new section connecting the newly built door of the cloister and the Romanesque cathedral church which was then still standing, perhaps finished soon after the bishop’s death in 1304. Part of that section may have been taken down when the upper part of the transept was built in the late fifteenth century and, as an attempt to break down the severity of the wall built during the last phase of the cathedral, someone decided to include these pieces in the new wall. It is perhaps a specific case of recording a lost building of which no other references remain. In conclusion, the memorial role of medi­eval architecture shows interesting aspects in the kingdom of Navarre. The most noteworthy, without any doubt, appeared in the first decades of the fifteenth century, when royal architectural endeavours achieved such high consideration that they were listed alongside most important deeds in Charles III the Noble’s epitaph, as well as in chronicles written during his reign or the following decades (especially in the one composed by the king’s grandson, Charles Prince of Viana). In this way, the monarch’s memory was linked to his ambitious undertakings in stone (the cathedral of Pamplona and the royal palaces in Olite and Tafalla), following the model established by his Valois relatives. Charles III the Noble, nephew to Charles V the Wise, learned from his uncles, the king of France, the duke of Berry, and the duke of Burgundy, that great buildings would make visible the magnificence of his person and his court. And, in fact, these palaces were visited and admired by ambassadors and knights during the reign of his daughter Queen Blanche. It is not surprising that the royal coats of arms were present in many religious and civil buildings at that time. By contrast, at other times, inscriptions or heraldry in Navarrese buildings were no different from those in other Iberian territories, and only sporadically did kings, governors (such as Eustache Beaumarchais and Renaud de Pont, who built castles taking their names), or prelates make use of architecture to maintain or promote individual memories.

60  Goñi Gaztambide thought they come “from his cenotaph”: José Goñi Gaztambide, Historia de los obispos de Pamplona. I. Siglos iv–xiii (Pamplona, 1979), 753.

Chapter 11

FAMILY MEMORY IN LATE MEDI­EVAL CATALONIA: THE MARCS, LORDS OF ERAMPRUNYÀ MIREIA COMAS-VIA

The construction of the family memory of the Marcs of Eramprunyà is closely linked to what is known as the “Book of the Barony of Eramprunyà” (Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà).1 I intend to analyze the contribution of this manu­script, produced between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, to the construction of the collective identity of this lineage.2 From the outset, we can point out that the Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà is a compilation of the normative corpus with which this seigneury was ruled. In other words, this book featured copies of the documents that guaranteed the governability and administration of the territory owned by the Marc family, with the clear intention of reinforcing its seigneurial power. This collection of documents also includes autobio­graphical accounts written by some of its authors, which allows us to relate it to the memorial tradition of the libri di ricordanze of late-medi­eval Italy.3

*  This research has been carried out within the framework of the project “El notariado en Cataluña, siglos xiii–xiv: práctica y actividad (NOTCAT) (HAR2015–65146–P),” funded by the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the Consolidated Research Group “MAHPA. Grup de Recerca en Estudis Medi­evals d’Art, Història, Paleografia i Arqueo­logia” (2014 SGR 794), recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia).

1  At the initiative of its current owner, Ignacio de Puig i Girona, the book was edited by myself and two colleagues: El llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà, ed. Elena Cantarell, Mireia Comas, and Carme Muntaner (Lleida, 2011). 2  Arsenio Dacosta, “Memoria linají�stica, legitimación dinástica y justificación personal en el Libro del linaje de los señores de Ayala y sus continuaciones,” e-Spania 11 (2011): 1, accessed December 22, 2018, http://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/20260.

3  For a far from comprehensive list of works devoted to this widely studied subject, see Christian Bec, Les marchands écrivains. Affaires et humanisme à Florence (1375–1434) (Paris, 1967); Leonida Pandimiglio, “Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli e la ragion di famiglia,” in Studi sul Medioevo cristiano offerti a Raffaello Morghen, 2 vols. (Rome, 1974), 2:553–608; Angelo Cicchetti and Raul Mordenti, “La scrittura dei libri di famiglia,” in Letteratura italiana. Volume terzo. Le forme del testo. II. La prosa, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Torino, 1984), 1117–59; Angelo Cicchetti and Raul Mordenti, I libri di famiglia in Italia. I. Filo­logia e storiografia letteraria (Rome, 1985); Duccio Balestracci, “Le memorie degli altri. Ricordanze, libri di conti e cronache dei ceti al margine della scrittura nell’Italia medi­ evale,” Studi Storici 184–87 (1988): 40–58; Marí�a Luz Mandingorra Llavata, “La configuración de la identidad privada: diarios y libros de memorias en la Baja Edad Media,” Historia. Instituciones. Mireia Comas-Via ([email protected]) is Professora lectora of Medi­eval History at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.

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The architect of the book was Jaume Marc I (1351–1375)4 who, after seizing the seigneury of Eramprunyà in 1351, ordered the compilation of the documents that legitimized his inheritance, which he had claimed after initiating a process to incapacitate his nephew Pericó, allegedly dumb and deaf, in order to take charge of the seigneury. Laying claim to his legitimate rights as Eramprunyà’s heir led to a confrontation with his sisterin-law Magdalena, Pere Marc’s widow (1338–ca. 1347) and guardian of the said Pericó, a conflict that ended with the appointment of Jaume Marc I as the new lord. It was precisely his desire to assert his rights over Eramprunyà that led him to commission the book discussed here. However, although Jaume Marc I began the compilation, it should be noted that the manu­script is a transgenerational creation involving all his successors until Jaume Marc IV (1466–1498).5 This chapter analyzes how the various lords of Eramprunyà contributed to the construction and articulation of the memory of their lineage through the legitimating discourse that is extraordinarily embodied in the Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà. To this end, we will first explore how the Marcs, the protagonists and subjects of this documentary collection, became lords of Eramprunyà, and how they grew from being professional scribes to becoming part of the knightly class under the protection of the royal house.6 Secondly, we will study the book, its materiality and its structure, to understand its importance as an indispensable tool for the construction of the memory of the lineage. To conclude, we will focus on the three documents included in the manu­script and written in the first person, which record the lives of three lords of Eramprunyà: Jaume Marc I himself, Jaume Marc III (1455–1466), and Jaume Marc IV (1455–1466).

Eramprunyà and the Marc Family

The castle of Eramprunyà7 was the centre of an homonymous seigneury, which, in the Middle Ages, stretched from the Llobregat river to the Garraf massif, that is, some thirty Documentos 29 (2002): 217–36; Giovanni Ciappelli, Memory, Family, and Self: Tuscan Family Books and Other European Egodocuments (14th–18th Century) (Leiden, 2014).

4  The dates in parentheses refer to the duration of his rule as lord of Eramprunyà. We will use this method to introduce each member of the Marc family.

5  Arsenio Dacosta uses this expression in his analysis of the Libro del linaje de los señores de Ayala and the subsequent additions to the original work. Dacosta, “Memoria linají�stica, legitimación,” 1.

6  Jaume J. Chiner Gimeno, Ausiàs March i la València del segle xv (1400–1459) (Valencia, 1997), 29–76. See also Maria Teresa Ferrer Mallol, “Altres famí�lies i membres de l’oligarquia barcelonina,” in El “Llibre del Consell” de la ciutat de Barcelona. s. xiv: les eleccions municipals, ed. Josefina Mutgé Vives, Carme Batlle i Gallart, Maria Cinta Mañé i Mas, Sebastià Riera i Viader, and Manuel Rovira Solà (Barcelona, 2007), 301–12. 7  On the history of Eramprunyà, see Francesc Bofarull, El castillo y la baronía de Aramprunyá (Barcelona, 1911). Dolors Sanahuja, El Castell d’Eramprunyà i el seu territori, segles x–xvi (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 1996); Secció Local del Museu de Gavà, Els Marc: cavallers i poetes al Castell d’Eramprunyà (Gavà, 1998); Josep Campmany i Guillot, “Senyors i pagesos a Eramprunyà, 1323–1460,” Materials del Baix Llobregat 5 (1999): 105–21; Dolors Sanahuja, Viladecans, terra de pagesos i senyors. Els temps medi­evals (Viladecans, 2002).



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kilometres southwest of the city of Barcelona.8 This domain, which bordered the Plain of Barcelona, belonged to the house of Barcelona until in 1323 King James II “the Just,” sold it to his treasurer and councillor Pere Marc el Prohom—the probus hominus— (1323–1338) for 120,000 sous, an amount the king destined to finance the conquest of the kingdom of Sardinia.9 The purchase of the castle of Eramprunyà, together with mixto imperio jurisdiction—the right to judge civil cases—within its territory,10 conveys Pere Marc’s desire to consolidate his social and economic standing and that of his family, that is, to crystallize his social ascent from scribe of the chancery of James II to the royal auditor in the Crown of Aragon, or mestre racional, and royal councillor to King Alfonso the Benign,11 into a seigneurial domain. This long career in the service of the Catalan– Aragonese monarchy was rewarded with the ennoblement of his son Jaume in 1360, an episode included in the Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà that will be later discussed in greater detail.12 The Marcs were lords of Eramprunyà between 1323 and 1548. Thus, in 1338, Pere el Prohom was succeeded as lord of Eramprunyà and of all the Catalan possessions of the family by his eldest son, also named Pere Marc, who followed in the footsteps of his father as royal councillor and mestre racional.13 His other son Jaume, who inherited all the family property in the kingdom of Valencia, was also linked to the court from a young age.14 After the death of the second Pere Marc, the succession was supposed to fall on his son Pericó, who was described as almost dumb and deaf (quaix mut e sort),15 but, as noted, Jaume Marc contested it alleging that, in his opinion, his nephew’s disability made him unfit to rule the estate he had legitimately inherited. An arbitration ruling between Jaume and his aforementioned sister-in-law Magdalena, Pericó Marc’s tutor, resolved the confrontation between the two and Eramprunyà passed into the hands of Jaume Marc, who thus took possession of the entire patrimony gathered by Pere Marc el Prohom. Jaume then left Valencia, where he had settled back in 1331, and moved to Barcelona to be able to manage the Catalan domains of the Marc family. 8  The territory of Eramprunyà included today’s minicipalities of Gavà, Begues, Castelldefels, Viladecans, and Sant Climent de Llobregat, as well as part of Sitges and Sant Boi de Llobregat. 9  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 119–25 (document 9).

10  At the time of the purchase, the king retained the merum et mixtum imperium—the right to judge criminal and civil cases—of the jurisdiction of Eramprunyà, until, a few months later, he ended up selling the lower level of jurisdiction or mixtum imperium to Pere Marc el Prohom. El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 134–36 (document 13). 11  Chiner Gimeno, Ausiàs March i la València, 35–42.

12  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 279–82 (document 60). 13  Chiner Gimeno, Ausiàs March i la València, 55–56.

14  Jaime J. Chiner Gimeno, “Cor d’acer, de carn e fust: Ausiàs March (1400–1459),” in Ausiàs March: Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional del 13 de mayo al 27 de junio (Valencia, 1999), 36, accessed December 22, 2018, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/cor-dacer-de-carn-e-fust--ausiasmarch-1400–1459. 15  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 49–66 (document 2).

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Jaume Marc I died in 1375 and was succeeded by his son Jaume Marc II (1375–1410).16 The latter was knighted around 1376 and participated in several sessions of the Catalan Parliament or Corts as a member of the military arm.17 In addition, this second Jaume Marc stands out for being a poet18 as well as the grandfather of the famous poet Ausiàs Marc.19 Jaume’s son, Lluí�s Marc (1410–1455), inherited Eramprunyà in 1410. One of the great concerns of this lord of Eramprunyà was the reunification of the various jurisdictions within his domains. To this end, he purchased Castelldefels from Gispert de Relat in 1427, and the settlement of Gavà in 1449. He also undertook an important revision of the rents he collected from his lands, a task that is well recorded in the Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà. Lluí�s Marc was succeeded by his son Jaume Marc III, who continued to expand the family estate with the acquisition of the house of La Roca, in present-day Gavà. Jaume Marc III died in 1466, at which time his son Jaume Marc IV began his rule as the new lord of Eramprunyà in the midst of the Catalan Civil War, in which he took an active part alongside King John II, as will be analyzed later using Jaume’s own account.20 In 1469, the castle of Eramprunyà was extensively damaged after being besieged by the troops of the Generalitat for over a month during the Catalan Civil War (1462–1472). From this moment onwards, the fortified house of Castelldefels became the centre of the seigneury. However, the lineage of the Marcs of Eramprunyà died out in 1548 with the death of Isabel Marc, daughter of Jaume Marc IV. Thereafter, Eramprunyà and its castle became the property of the Fiveller family, in the person of Hug Joan de Fiveller i de Palou, grandson of Lucrècia Marc i Ballester, sister of Jaume Marc IV.21

The Book

As we have seen, the Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà is connected to Jaume Marc’s inheritance of the castle of Eramprunyà and its territory following the ruling of 1351. It is a manu­script written on paper with a flexible binding and a parchment cover, which 16  His will was published in Josep Hernando Delgado, “El testament de Jaume Marc, senyor d’Eramprunyà, pare dels poetes Jaume i Pere Marc i avi d’À� usias Marc,” Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 12 (1993): 305–314, accessed December 22, 2018, www.raco.cat/index.php/ArxiuTextos/ article/view/235585. 17  Ferrer Mallol, “Altres famí�lies i membres,” 308.

18  Jaume Marc, Obra poètica, ed. Josep Pujol (Barcelona, 1994).

19  For a bio­graphy of the poet Ausiàs Marc, see Jaume J. Chiner, Ausiàs March i la València, and also Voro López i Verdejo, “Ausias March: vida i obra,” in Ausias March: estudis, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1997), 1:95–117; Ferran Garcia-Oliver, En la vida d’Ausiàs March (Barcelona, 1998).

20  On this conflict, see Santiago Sobrequés Vidal and Jaume Sobrequés Callicó, La guerra civil catalana del segle xv, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1987); Imma Muxella Prat, La terra en guerra. L’acció de les institucions durant el regnat de Renat d’Anjou (1466–1472) (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 2013); Alan Ryder, The Wreck of Catalonia. Civil War in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 2007). 21  On the inheritance of the seigneury of Eramprunyà in later centuries, see Josep Fernández Trabal, Pilar Frago Pérez, and Joan Pons Alzina, eds., Arxiu de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà (fons de la familia Girona) (1587–1930) (Barcelona, 2005).



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is in fact a reused document.22 The manu­script, in folio format, consists of 183 pages and contains seventy-nine documents dated between 1143 and 1475 and a summary. Several folios were trimmed as a result of the various bindings the manu­script has undergone over time, and several others are missing, which has altered the order of some of the documents. Nevertheless, the overall state of conservation is remarkably good. Moreover, part of the book features an ancient foliation in Roman numerals that corresponds to the documents included in the aforementioned summary. The latter was clearly produced in the first phase of composition of the book, for the documents listed there belong to the period of Jaume Marc I. Indeed, the Book of the Barony was written following the appointment of Jaume Marc I as lord of Eramprunyà, as the documents demonstrating his rights over the estate were copied into it. Thus, the book begins with a careful selection of documents that indisputably justify the rights of Jaume Marc I, namely the will of Pere Marc el Prohom,23 and the arbitration ruling that granted Jaume the castle and its territory.24 Two additional rulings were then copied in relation to the conflict between Pere Marc and his son Pericó and the lords of Viladecans, Gavà, and the Torre Burgesa over the limits of their respective jurisdictions.25 This was followed by a copy of the document recording the purchase of the castle of Eramprunyà by Pere Marc el Prohom from King James II the Just26 and the subsequent confirmation by King Alfonso the Benign.27 In addition, the manu­script also includes a copy of the deed of the purchase of the castellany of the castle, owned by Blanca de Centelles, in 1337, by Pere Marc el Prohom for the price of 141,000 Barcelonan sous.28 This first group of documents ends with the various homages that the new lord of Eramprunyà demanded from his feudatories, including his nephew Pericó, in order to reaffirm his authority after taking possession of the castle.29 Finally, three collections of customs and usages of the territory of Eramprunyà that predate the purchase of the domain by Pere Marc el Prohom in 1323 were also included in this first phase of composition of the manu­script.30 22  Here we are following the description of the book provided in El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 16. 23  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 31–49 (document 1).

24  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 49–66 (document 2). The copy includes the list of sales of perpetual annuities (censals morts) and other properties that Jaume Marc I carried out to comply with the terms of the ruling. El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 70–80 (document 4). 25  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 70–80 (document 4); 89–98, (document 6).

26  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 119–25 (document 9). The receipt of payment was copied later on. El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 125–26 (document 10). 27  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 126–28 (document 11).

28  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 128–34 (document 12).

29  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 138–39 (document 16); 146–48 (document 19); 148–53 (document 20); 153–55 (document 21); 155–57 (document 22); 157–59 (document 23); and 160–61 (document 24). 30  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 218–22 (document 46); 223–29 (document 47); and 229–32 (document 48) respectively.

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Admittedly, the arrangement of the documents reinforces the legitimizing discourse with which the book was conceived and the desire of its author to strengthen his right to the succession at the head of Eramprunyà. At the same time, another element must be taken into consideration when assessing the way in which the image of the lineage was to be constructed. Jaume Marc I’s original plan involved adding value to the book by illuminating the manu­script with several miniatures, which were however never executed, except for one.31 Had the book been completed in accordance with his wishes, the result would have been an extremely beautiful manu­script that would have greatly promoted the image of Jaume Marc I and his family. Furthermore, it should be noted that three of these documents were not only copied in their Latin original versions, but were also translated into Catalan:32 “This ruling was translated word by word from Latin to Romance, as it follows, by the notary Ffrancesch de Ladernosa.”33 These three examples were related to rulings on the inheritance of the castle of Eramprunyà by Jaume Marc I, as well as on the limits, jurisdictions, and rights of its territory. Undoubtedly, their importance made the correct understanding of their content absolutely necessary for the administration of the estate, and therefore, they were translated from Latin into Catalan and copied next to the Latin versions.34 The main body of the manu­script, made up of documents copied in the fourteenth century, was continued in the following century. Jaume Marc II (1375–1410) had copied into it documents linked to the management of the domain. These included several rent rolls,35 as well as two arbitration rulings concerning the boundaries of the jurisdictions of Gavà and the house of La Roca.36 His son Lluí�s, who succeeded him at the head of Eramprunyà, proceeded in a similar way, as he commissioned capbreus37 of all his 31  The only miniature is unfinished and corresponds to a rendering of homage. El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 138–39 (document 16).

32  These are documents 2, 4, and 7, and their respective translations are recorded as Documents 8, 5, and 6. El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 49–66 (document 2); 70–80 (document 4); 80–89 (document 5); 89–98 (document 6); 98–102 (document 7); and 102–19 (document 8).

33  “[L]a qual sentència és açí� transledada de paraula a paraula de latí� en romans, axí� com se segeix, per man d’en Ffrancesch de Ladernosa, notari.” Cited from El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 50 (document 2). 34  As for the language of the rest of the documents, it is worth noting that the documents in Latin, over half of the whole collection, correspond to documentary typo­logies usually written in this language in the medi­eval and modern periods (wills, sales, receipts of payment, and rulings, among others). The documents written in Catalan are mainly memoirs, customs, capbreus, and some injunctions. 35  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 307–15 (document 71); 315–18 (document 72); 323–28 (document 75); and 328–30 (document 76). 36  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 259–62 (document 54); and 262–72 (document 55), respectively.

37  From caput brevis, being an inventory of the lord’s patrimony, specifying tenants’ obligations and services.



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domains upon taking over the seigneury. In fact, he updated one of the capbreus made by Jaume Marc II by adding the tenancies and acquisitions he had incorporated.38 A fourth phase of composition of the manu­script must be placed under the rule of Jaume Marc III, although it only comprises the account that this lord of Eramprunyà made of the birth of his six children.39 Jaume Marc IV also left his mark on the book, as he narrated in great detail the French siege and takeover of the castle of Eramprunyà, as well as his captivity within the context of the Catalan Civil War.40 These two reports will be analyzed in the following section. It was probably also in this same period, that is, at the end of the fifteenth century, that the blank spaces between documents were reused to list the finding aids of the patrimonial archive of the seigneury, so that the inventory of the documents of the Marc family is spread over a large section of the book.41 It could be considered that the manu­script was completed under the rule of Jaume Marc IV, but the fact is that it remained an open instrument, a living book. This circumstance is evidenced by the updates in the entries of the capbreus and rent rolls that reflect purchases, sales, and inheritances concerning the various manses (masos) and lands of the domain. The numerous reading aids, in the form of manicules or small drawings42—whose aim was to help quickly locate the most significant para­graphs of each document—must be interpreted in the same way. We also find multiple reading marks in the form of either simple lines on the margin of para­graphs or full marginal annotations indicating the content of the para­graph that reach up to the twentieth century. The most recent annotations should be connected to the purchase of the barony in 1897 by the banker Manuel Girona i Agrafel from Eulàlia de Segarra i de l’Espagnol—widow of Dí�dac de Foxà—and Ramon de Sarriera i de Villalonga. With this acquisition, Manuel Girona undoubtedly sought the prestige that the purchase of old manorial properties such as the castle of Eramprunyà and the rest of the estate of the old seigneury—including the castle of Castelldefels itself—gave him. Along with the transferred assets and rights, Manuel Girona also received the associated documentary heritage and, therefore, the Llibre de la Baronia.43 During the process of recovery of property rights and rationalization initiated by this banker, all this documentation, and especially the book, 38  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., (document 78).

39  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 302 (document 65).

40  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 279–82 (document 60).

41  This inventory is not included in the aforementioned edition of the Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà, because it is unrelated to the original structure of the compilation. However, its content is the subject of an independent study by Daniel Piñol, “Tinc una carta.” La gestió de la documentació a la Baronia d’Eramprunyà, forthcoming. I would like to thank the author for sharing the text with me before its publication. 42  These are a ship and a dolphin drawn in documents 34 and 48, respectively. El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 177–79 (document 34); and 229–32 (document 48). 43  The complete catalogue of the collection, which the family lent to the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya / National Archive of Catalonia (ANC) for digitization, can be found in Fernández, Frago, and Pons, Arxiu de la Baronia.

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were essential when it came to opening administrative and legal proceedings to claim his rights as the new owner. This fact is illustrated by the annotation on the front pastedown of the book, which reads as follows: Owned by the Most Excellent Mr. Manuel Girona, landowner from Barcelona, senator for life and other titles, by virtue of the purchase made from the barons of all their rights, domains, and assets included in the municipal districts of Castelldefels, Gavà, and Begas, according to deed of February 12, 1897, signed before the notary of Barcelona Mr. Josep Fontanals y Arater. This deed is duly registered in the property registry of Sant Feliu de Llobregat, covering all titles, rights, domains, and others of the Barony of Eramprunyà.44

In this way, the additions made during the period of ownership of the banker Manuel Girona also contributed to the construction of the family memory. However, in this case, it meant the beginning of a new story for a new family. Lastly, the analysis of the typo­logies of the documents included in the Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà shows that this documentary collection does not display great typo­logical richness given its eminently patrimonial character.45 Thus, arbitration rulings stand out above all, which should be specifically connected to the determination of the lords of Eramprunyà to have their jurisdictional rights respected.46 In the same vein, we must bear in mind the demands made by Jaume Marc and his successors from their feudatories; especially numerous are those related to the recovery of the dominion over the house and fief of la Sentiu, in present-day Gavà.47 This group of documents linked to the exercise of feudal rights also comprises the pledges of homage and loyalty that Jaume Marc I received from various feudatories.48 Finally, it is also necessary to mention the capbreus and rent rolls that resulted from the administration of the domain among the most frequent documentary typo­logies.49

44  “Propietat de l’Excelentí�sim Senyor Don Manuel Girona, hisendat natural de Barcelona, senador vitalici y altres tí�tols, en virtut de compra feta als barons de tots los seus drets, dominis y accions compresos en los districtes municipals de Castelldefels, Gavà y Begas, segons escriptura de 12 febrer 1897, davant lo notari de Barcelona Don Joseph Fontanals y Arater. Nota: Aquesta escriptura està degudament inscripta en los registres de la propietat de San Feliu de Llobregat, extenent-se a tots los tí�tols, drets, dominis y demés de la Baronia d’Aramprunyà.” This text is also edited in El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 15. 45  A list of documentary typo­logies can be found in El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 18–21.

46  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 49–66 (document 2); 70–80 (document 4); 80–89 (document 5); 89–98 (document 6); 98–102 (document 7); 102–19 (document 8); 166–68 (document 28); 243–47 (document 51); 247–55 (document 52); 255–59 (document 53); 259–62 (document 54); and 262–72 (document 55). 47  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 137–38 (document 15); 139–44 (document 17); 145, (document 18); 215–18 (document 45); 238–42 (document 50); 272–73 (document 56); 274–75 (document 57); 275–77 (document 58); 284–85 (document 62); and 285–86 (document 63). 48  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 138–39 (document 16); 146–48 (document 19); 148–53 (document 20); 153–55 (document 21); 155–57 (document 22); 157–59 (document 23); and 160–61 (document 24).

49  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 282–284 (document 61); 286–302 (document 64); 304–5 (document 67); 305 (document 68); 307–15 (document 71); 315–18 (document 72);



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The Three Memorial Documents

In the midst of this entire documentary corpus, there are some documents with unique characteristics that cannot be linked to the management of the estate, but rather to the life experience of its owners. As mentioned above, these are three autobio­graphical or family accounts that reflect the unquestionable intention of their authors, Jaume Marc I, Jaume Marc III, and Jaume Marc IV, respectively, to record individual events that could serve as remembrance of the lineage. First, we find the first-person account of the knighting of Jaume Marc I by King Peter the Ceremonious in 1360.50 This document captures first-hand the personality of its author. The narration begins with the encounter between the king and the lord of Eramprunyà, in which Peter the Ceremonious expressed his will to thank Jaume for the services rendered, not only by him, but also by his sons Jaume and Pere, who had participated in the war against the king of Castile, Peter the Cruel, in the so-called War of the Two Peters. It is for this reason that the king proposed to make him a knight, so that he and his descendants could benefit from this honour: Jaume Marc, we have summoned you for this which we will tell you: You have good sons who have served us well in these matters that we have with the king of Castile, and as we are sure that they would be pleased to ascend to the honour of chivalry, but they would like to ascend through you, that is to say, that you would have it first, and given that you are an honoured citizen and you have an honoured heritage (although the order of chivalry is much more honoured), and since you will be able to sustain and maintain this estate through the inheritance of the castle of Eramprunyà, by virtue of this and for the love of you and your children this you deserve, we beg you to accept knighthood, for this will please us, as we are truly pleased to place the old households in the hands of citizens, and so we beg you to comply.51

Before responding to the monarch’s proposal, Jaume Marc I let him know that he needed to seek advice from Queen Elisenda de Montcada, widow of King James II, and from the infant Peter of Aragon, son of King James II and Queen Blanca of Anjou. In the first place he visited the infant, whose councillor he had been for some time. The infant welcomed the news with great joy and, according to the text, was even moved to tears when 318–20 (document 73); 320–23 (document 74); 328–30 (document 76); 330–37 (document 77); and 337–403 (document 78).

50  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 232–38 (document 49). Bofarull was the first to transcribe the text of the knighting of Jaume Marc I in his book on the Barony of Eramprunyà (Bofarull, El castillo y la baronía, 92–98).

51  “En Jacme March, nós vos havem demanat per ço que us direm: vós havets bons ffils e an-nos bé servit en aquests affers que havem ab lo rey de Castella, e com nos siam çerts que a els plauria puyar en estament de honor de cavaylleria, mas vulrien-hi muntar per lo grau vostre, ço és que vos la preséssets primer e jassia que vós siats honrat ciutadà e hayats honrada heretat, encara és molt pus honrat orde de cavaylleria e com vos aquest orde puscats sostenir e mantenir per la heretat que havets del castell de Alaprunyà, en per amor de ço e per amor de vos e de vostres fils qui açò merexets, nós vos pregam que vullats pendre cavlleria nostra, com de açò nos farets plaer, con verament nós havem plaer de tornar los casals antichs qui són venguts en mans de ciutadans, e axí� de ço vos pregam que en tot cas vos ho vullats fer.” Cited from El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 233 (document 49).

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he heard Jaume’s words: “his eyes filled with tears” (los vulys li·n vengeren en aygua). Then, the lord of Eramprunyà went to the monastery of Pedralbes in Barcelona, where Queen Elisenda lived. She also accepted the news with great joy and immediately asked Jaume about the place he wanted to celebrate the ceremony and the clothes he planned to wear for the occasion. Following these reactions, Jaume Marc I confirmed his willingness to accept knighthood from the king, but nevertheless asked him to hold a private ceremony, “secret” as he defines it, with only a few guests. The ceremony, held on December 8, 1360, in the monastery of Pedralbes, is described in detail: the mass, which included the ritual of investiture of a knight, the meal after the ceremony, the arrangement of the guests at the table, and even the dishes served. In order to further dignify the account, two blank spaces were reserved to illustrate the text. However, as in the rest of the manu­script, the decoration was never completed; therefore, we do not know what scene the author had in mind. Nevertheless, the layout of the page is vaguely reminiscent of fol. 27r of the Llibre dels fets by King James I, which features the miniature that illuminates the passage of the dinner held in Tarragona, during which the conquest of Mallorca was decided.52 In the face of such an account, we cannot help but wonder why a manu­script that mainly contained documents related to the management of a seigneury included a document as personal as a first-person narration of the appointment of its author as a knight. Undoubtedly, Jaume Marc I’s purpose was to record the episode for future remembrance, to give relevance to his person and to show how far he had gone: ten years after receiving Eramprunyà—thanks to a ruling—he was knighted at the age of sixty, a dignity that neither his father nor his brother Pere had achieved. Furthermore, it should be noted that the text is undoubtedly an instrument of the first order to fix the moment of greatest importance and social significance of his lineage in the memory of his successors: the moment when he left behind his status as a citizen to become a member of the nobility. In fact, it is this account exalting his own figure and lineage that closes Jaume Marc I’s contribution to the Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà. The second document within this set of memorial texts is the record made by Jaume Marc III of the birth of his children Isabel, Lluí�s, Jaume, Maria, Carles, and Pere.53 Each of the entries devoted to the children briefly indicates the date and place of their birth and the name of their respective godparents. One specifies that the girl named Maria died a few hours after birth, given that she was premature. As an example, we reproduce the para­graph related to Jaume who, despite not being the firstborn, ended up succeeding his father as lord of Eramprunyà: My son Jaume was born on Sunday, St. Clare’s Day, which was the 12th of August, at three o’clock in the morning, in Barcelona, in the year 1442. His godparents were the lord of Sant Viçens and Joan Marquet, and my lady mother was his godmother.54

52  Barcelona, Biblioteca de la Universtitat de Barcelona. Fons de reserva, MS 1: Jaume I, Crònica del rei en Jacme, fol. 27r, accessed December 22, 2018, www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/ bmc34912. 53  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 302 (document 65).

54  “Diumenge, dia de santa Clara, qui fou ha XII del mes d’aguost, ha tres hores de matí�, nasqué



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Unlike the previous account, this text clearly has a genealogical function that reminds us of accounts books or llibres de compte i raó,55 in which we also find this desire to leave a written memory of the name and birth of descendants, both male and female. Finally, we would like to mention Jaume Marc IV’s contribution to the manu­script with his account of how he lived through the last years of the Catalan Civil War, when he fought alongside King John II.56 The text begins with an explanation of René of Anjou’s troops’ usurpation first of the house and territory of Castelldefels in 1468 and, later, of the hospital of Cervelló in 1469. After the siege and capture of the castle of Eramprunyà that took place that same year, Jaume was imprisoned in the tower of the castle of Collioure by Huguet Viaut, captain of the king of France and lieutenant of the governor of Roussillon. Jaume Marc IV described the misery of his captivity in which he spent three months in shackles (tres mesos ab grillons) and, later, twenty-two days without ever seeing the light, with fifty-two pounds of iron on his legs (XXII dies sens que jamés viu claror, ab cinquanta-dos liures de fero hen les cames) inside a silo of the tower. Once he was released after paying the ransom, he took up arms again. The text details his participation in various confrontations, such as the siege of the town of Sabadell. The narration ends with the liberation of his dominions after the siege of Barcelona that meant the end of the war:57 Thus, on December 24 of the said year [1472], on Christmas Eve, with the help of two of my vassals who rose up at the round tower, I took Casteldefels. I had fourteen horsemen with me, among them my first cousin, Mosén Guilem Ramon de Balera, and seventy infantry men, all of them with no pay. I took some lackeys and knights from there. The ones who surrendered the castle to me were Johanet Farer, son of Antoni Farer, and Pere Saval. I seized some good artillery pieces. On that same day, I took the house in Gavà that they abandoned because they did not dare to wait. I left people there. Shortly afterwards, the people from Sant Climent handed me the church and there I left Macià as captain; and in Gavà, a servant of mine they called Mateu Fuster.58

mon fil Jaume, en Barcelona, en l’any M CCCC XXXX II. Foren padrins lo senyor de Sant Viçens hi en Johan Marquet, padrina la senyora ma mare.” Cited from El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 302 (document 65).

55  Balestracci, “Le memorie degli altri,” 42; Marí�a Luz Mandingorra Llavata, “Comensí a escriure en lo present libre per mamoriegar: escrituras del recuerdo entre la Edad Media y el Renacimiento,” in Culturas del escrito en el mundo occidental: del Renacimiento a la contemporaneidad, ed. Antonio Castillo Gómez (Madrid, 2015), 149–60 at 157. 56  El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 279–282 (document 60).

57  Josep Capmany i Guillot, “La guerra civil del s. xv a Eramprunyà,” Materials del Baix Llobregat 6 (2000): 107–24, accessed December 17, 2019, https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/ articulo?codigo=7157359. 58  “Í�tem ha XXIIII del mes de deenbre del dit any [1472], la vigí�lia de Nadal, ab a[cap]te de dos vasals meus qui s’alsaran ab la tora rodona, jo prenguí� Casteldefels. Tenia jo XIIII de caval, en què era mon cosí�n yermà, mosèn Guilem Ramon de Balera, e setanta pehons, tots sens sou. Prenguí� de dins alguns lacayhos hi cavalés. Los qui·m donaren lo castel eren Johanet Farer, fill de n’Antoni Farer, e Pere Saval. Prenguí� bon artelaria. Dintre aquel dia mateix, prenguí� la casa de Guavà que els desempararen que no y gosaren esperar. Lexí�-y gent. Poch aprés, los de Sent Climent me donoraren la església e lexí�-y capità dels mateys a·n [±5] Macià; a Gavà, hun criat meu a qui deyhen Mateu Fuster.” Cited from El llibre de la Baronia, ed. Cantarell et al., 281 (document 60).

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This last text is, in our opinion, a representative example of personalized writing, in which the author aims to narrate his active participation in the conflict alongside King John II, but, at the same time, to represent himself in all the hardships suffered during his imprisonment in the castle of Collioure.59 The lords of Eramprunyà indeed opposed John II during the first years of the war, but Jaume Marc IV ended up abandoning the side of the Diputació del General, as did other members of the Catalan nobility. Needless to say, the text conveys his loyalty to the crown. Probably, Jaume Marc IV was not trying to become a chronicler of his time, but rather to record his undeniably traumatic vital experience. Ultimately, when analyzing these three memorial documents, their materiality as a written product must also be taken into consideration. In this sense, it should be noted that Jaume Marc I’s text was produced by a professional scribe, who copied the rest of the documents from the same period. Conversely, in all likelihood, the other two were written, in a very cursive ductus, by their respective authors, a circumstance that shows their desire to adopt writing in the first person to catalyze their personal experience.60

Conclusion

The Llibre de la Baronia d’Eramprunyà is an obvious example of writing used to construct the memory of a lineage. Jaume Marc I commissioned the compilation of this book with the purpose of demonstrating his legitimate rights over the seigneury he had just received. His heirs in turn continued the book with the aim of maintaining the memory of their family and contributing their part to it, but also in order to manage their domain in the best possible way. When Jaume Marc I undertook the composition of the manu­script, he had a very clear objective, namely, to justify his takeover of the domain of Eramprunyà, as well as producing an exceptional tool for the administration of the seigneury. However, his descendants also contributed to Jaume’s individual project and thus participated in the intergenerational construction of the collective memory of the Marc family.61 Therefore, although the outcome would be a common plan to enhance the family name, each author gave a specific personality to the book as a whole. After Jaume Marc I, his descendants no longer needed to justify themselves as he had done, but could participate in the construction of the memory of the lineage engaging in a mission of their own.62 In this way, the descendants of Pere Marc el Prohom became narrators of their own lives and of the lives of others.63 59  Marí�a Luz Mandingorra Llavata, “El libro de memorias y la escritura del yo,” Cultura Escrita & Sociedad 1 (2005): 95. 60  Mandingorra, “Comensí a escriure,” 154.

61  Dacosta, “Memoria linají�stica, legitimación,” 2.

62  Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Genealogy: Form and Function in Medi­eval Historical Narrative,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 22 (1983): 43–53 at 47. 63  Balestracci, “Le memorie degli altri,” 47.

Chapter 12

THE TOMB AS TOOL FOR KEEPING MEMORY ALIVE: THE CASE OF LATE MEDI­EVAL ZARAGOZA ANA DEL CAMPO GUTIÉRREZ

In 1468 John II (1398–1479), monarch of the Crown of Aragon, went through cata-

racts surgery.1 The king experienced the normal nervousness before the operation and, thus, he felt compelled to ask for a little bit of divine help. It is said that John II prayed to St. Engracia, a young girl martyred in 254 in Zaragoza,2 to intercede on his behalf. Luckily, the surgical procedure was successful. As a way to thank the saint, the king promised to transform the old parish dedicated to her in the city into a monastery of the order of St. Jerome.3 Nevertheless, John II died before he could turn his project into a reality and it was his son and heir, Ferdinand II (1452–1516), who inaugurated the Hieronymite monastery of Santa Engracia in Zaragoza in 1493.4 The members of the Trastamara royal family were devoted supporters and promoters of the Order of St. Jerome. Their sponsorship meant the foundation of the very first Hieronymite monastery in the Kingdom of Aragon, which was located—as we have just seen—in Zaragoza. But not everyone in the city was happy about it. Many of its inhabitants disliked the project, particularly those who dwelt near that church, although they had nothing against the monks. Consequently, the parishioners of St. Engracia wrote a letter of complaint, in which they argued that their devotion was focused on that particular church (the document explained that the parishioners “have their devotions [there] and their parents and relatives buried there”).5 They also begged the king to preserve the 1  Jerónimo de Zurita, Anales de Aragón, ed. Á� ngel Canellas López (Zaragoza, 2003), 305 (book 18, chap. 18).

2  Marí�a del Carmen Garcí�a Herrero and Jesús Criado Mainar, “Orosia y Engracia, princesas santas de la montaña y del llano,” in Artesanas de vida. Mujeres de la Edad Media, ed. Marí�a del Carmen Garcí�a Herrero (Zaragoza, 2009), 282–309. 3  León Benito Martón, Origen y antigüedades de el subterráneo y celebérrimo Santuario de Santa María de las Santas Massas, oy Real Monasterio de Santa Engracia de Zaragoza de la Orden de Nuestro Padre San Gerónimo (Zaragoza, 1737), 475–76.

4  Carmen Morte, “El monasterio jerónimo de Santa Engracia de Zaragoza en el mecenazgo real,” in Santa Engracia: nuevas aportaciones para la historia del monasterio y basílica, ed. Arturo Ansón (Zaragoza, 2002), 103–7.

5  “Tienen alli sus devociones y sepultados sus padres y parientes.” Cited from Carlos Laliena, “Se firmó por parrochiano… a lo espiritual e a lo temporal,” in Un año en la historia de Aragón: 1492, ed. José Á� ngel Sesma Muñoz (Zaragoza, 1991), 363–64. Ana del Campo Gutiérrez ([email protected]) is Lecturer in Medi­eval History at the Uni­ver­ sity of St. Andrews, Scotland.

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parochial status of St. Engracia. Ferdinand II accepted their petition and, subsequently, asked the Pope for a bull that allowed the new monastery church to act as a local parish.6 What was at stake here was the access of the parishioners to the tombs of their deceased relatives. In many cases, they had paid for those burial places and sepulchres, or at least had restored them, and they also had kept and decorated them. This was how the parishioners honoured and took care of their ancestors. But tombs were also a way to announce the identities of the deceased and their families, a way to proclaim their social status and to expose the deeds and merits of their kin. The parochial status of the church of St. Engracia was crucial here, because if the new monastery meant the closure of the church, nobody—apart from the monks—could receive the message transmitted by the graves. Which message was this? We have just mentioned that some ideas of social status were disseminated through the language of tombs, but both historians and anthropo­ logists alike agree on the fact that sepultures had a twofold function in the Middle Ages: one of religious character and another of a social nature.7 To understand these functions, we must go back in time. As a matter of fact, we must move back to the Old Testament, where Psalm 49 (48 according to the Vulgate) alludes to the unavoidable character of death and affirms that graves are the houses where the dead dwell.8 Following a tradition rooted in this psalm, a constitution offered by Constantius II and Julius Caesar in Milan ca. 356 insisted that tombs be considered the home of the dead.9 Many centuries later another Aragonese city, that of Teruel, maintained the very same conception of the sepulchre as the deceased’s house in its Fuero or first legal code, which was enacted in 1177.10 In this residence the dead would await the Last Judgement, when his or her body would rise and, once the verdict is delivered, reach Heaven or Hell. 6  Laliena, “Se firmó por parrochiano,” 363–64.

7  For example, Nigel Soul explained this saying that a funerary monument had “a dual role,” firstly, to spur intercession and, secondly, to act as a witness of social status (Nigel Saul, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages: History and Representation (Oxford, 2009), 143.

8  Ps. 49: 7–13: “No man can redeem the life of another / or give to God a ransom for him // the ransom for a life is costly, / no payment is ever enough // that he should live on forever / and not see decay. // For all can see that wise men die; / the foolish and the senseless alike perish / and leave their wealth to others. // Their tombs will remain their houses forever, / their dwellings for endless generations, / though they had named lands after themselves. // But man, despite his riches, does not endure; he is like the beasts that perish.” 9  “Those persons who violate the habitations of the shades, the homes, so to speak, of the dead, appear to perpetrate a twofold crime. For they both despoil the buried dead by the destruction of the tombs, and they contaminate the living by the use of this material in building. If any person, therefore, should take away from a tomb, stones or marbles or columns or any other material for the purpose of building or if he should do this for the purpose of selling such material, he shall be compelled to pay ten pounds of gold to the tax.” Cited from Eric Rébillard, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 2009), 64.

10  “Moreover he ordered that anyone who unearthed a man or who had stolen clothes from the dead, and that this is proved, must pay five hundred shillings, given the cruelty of the deed. If he stole stones from the grave or placed them in a different way and this was proved, must be treated as in a case of theft; if not, that he swear with twelve neighbours for all these things and



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Even St. Augustine (d. 430) agreed on this. In one of his sermons, precisely when commenting on the above-mentioned Psalm 49, he said of the dead that “their tombs are their homes forever.” Still, the bishop of Hippo fiercely criticized the huge amount of money people spent on obsequies and sepulchres. Although he conceded that expensive funerals and monuments could be “some sort of consolation for the living,” St. Augustine insisted that they were “not any assistance for the dead” and that the deceased could only “be helped by the prayers of holy Church, and the Eucharistic sacrifice, and alms distributed for the repose of their spirits.”11 The tomb itself played a crucial role. St. Augustine considered graves to be not only “solaces of survivors,” but an important catalyst for prayers for the dead. In his De cura pro mortuis gerenda, the bishop of Hippo explained, that upon recollection of the place in which are deposited the bodies of those whom they love, they should by prayer commend them to those same Saints, who have as patrons taken them into their charge to aid them before the Lord.

Augustine concluded,

the only reason why the name “memorials” or “monuments” is given to those sepulchres of the dead which become specially distinguished, is that they recall to memory, and by putting in mind cause us to think of, them who by death are withdrawn from the eyes of the living, that they may not by forgetfulness be also withdrawn from men’s hearts. For both the term memorial most plainly shews this, and monument is so named from monishing, that is, putting in mind.12

Thus, according to St. Augustine, tombs—particularly those of saints and martyrs—are a reminder of the dead. When contemplating a grave, the living recall the deceased and tend to offer a prayer for them. This idea of the character and function of tombs installed itself easily into Christian thought and there it stayed largely unchanged throughout the Middle Ages and even beyond.13 For example, the English poet and antiquarian John Weever (1576–1632) shared the Augustinian approach to this issue and wrote in his Antient Funeral Monuments of Great Britain, Ireland, and the Islands that funerary monuments are sometimes called memories (a memoria, vel a monendo), in that, by them we are put in mind, and warned to consider our fragile condition; for they are external helps, to excite and stir up our inwards thoughts (habere memoriam mortis semper prae oculis), to have

that he be believed” (De aquel que muerto dessoterrare: Otrosi mando que qual qujere que omne dessoterrare o pannyos de los muertos aura furtado et prouado’l sera, peche por qual qujere D sueldos, por que lo echo de su casa crudel mjientre. Si algunas piedras encara del sepulcro furtare o en otra manera las prisiere et prouado’l fuere, asi como de otro furto es tenjdo de responder; si no, jure con xii uezinos por todas esas cosas et sea credido). Cited from El Fuero de Teruel, ed. Max Gorosch (Stockholm, 1950), 308–9 (law 527 headed “Whoever unearths the dead”). 11  Rébillard, The Care of the Dead, 131–32.

12  St. Augustine, “On care to be had for the dead,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: First Series, Volume III – Saint Augustine: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, ed. Philip Schaff (New York, 2007), 541–42 (section 6). 13  Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2008), 1.

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the remembrance of death ever before our eyes, and that our deceased brethren may not be out of mind, as out of sight.14

Later on in his treatise, Weever mentioned that he had found a register in the Grey Friars’ monastery in London. In it, a definition of tomb or sepulchre was provided: “A sepulchre (monimentum) means, as it were, to bring to mind (momens mentem) and this is the etymo­logy that scholars usually give. This is because tombs bring things to the human mind in two ways: either they sharply remind us of death when we see the graves of those who have passed away, or the sight of them is enough to remind or move the minds of their loved ones to say prayers for them.”15 Both Weever’s words and findings sum up very well the religious purpose of tombs. On the one hand, they remind the living of the inevitability of death, that is, when somebody looks at a grave, he or she will recall their own mortality and, probably, feel compelled to prepare his or herself for death in a Christian way. On the other hand, tombs remind the living of the dead and, thus, the living tend to put into practice the suffragia (prayers, masses, and almsgiving) in order to help the dead in the afterlife. Given their capability to influence people’s thoughts and acts, tombs often were planned and designed carefully for this twofold message: firstly, one message of a social character, which reminded viewers of the character of the deceased and, secondly, another message with religious implications by which the dead asked the living for intercession. This twofold message was an appeal to the spectators’ memory, reminding them of the deceased’s social status, as well as to pray and perform pious deeds for the sake of the dead. This is why it can be said that medi­eval graves tried to send a message of “social memory” and “religious memory” too. To do this in the most effective way, much attention was paid to the message itself, but it was also very important to attract the right audience. I’ll explain this idea with an example. In 1391 a canon of the cathedral of Segovia (in the Crown of Castile) named Fernando López de Arjona arrived in Zaragoza. He went to St. Dominic’s monastery to retrieve the remains of one of his relatives, who was buried there. This relative of his, whose name was Gonzalo, was not a nobody: he had been a bishop of Segovia, although not for long.16 14  John Weever, Antient Funeral Monuments of Great-Britain, Ireland, and the Islands Adjacent with the Dissolved Monasteries therein Contained (London, 1747), 9.

15  “Monimentum est quasi monens mentem, & sic solet a doctoribus etymo­logiari: monet namque bifarie humanam mentem, cum aut mortis memoriam incutit visis precedentium sepulchris; aut eisdem conspectus, mentes moneantur sive moveantur carorum, ad redden, suffragia pro ipsis.” Cited from Weever, Antient Funeral Monuments, 9.

16  It is quite difficult to know who this “don Gonzalo” was. Among the bishops of Segovia in the second half of the fourteenth century, there is a certain Gonzalo, who is said to have died in Zaragoza in 1378; he is the most likely candidate to be Fernando López de Arjona’s relative (José Marí�a Quadrado, Segovia. Recuerdos y bellezas de España (Valladolid, 2007), 459). Quadrado mentioned another bishop called Gonzalo and affirmed that his bishopric “did not last long.” Nevertheless, it is possible that this second bishop Gonzalo never existed. Other sources indicate that the first bishop Gonzalo, the one said to have died in Zaragoza, was Gonzalo de Aguilar, although little is known of him. Diego de Colmenares, Historia de la insigne ciudad de Segovia y compendio de las historias de Castilla, 2 vols. (Segovia, 1846), 2:180; Á� ngel Garcí�a Garcí�a-Estévez, “Episcopo­logio de



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Fernando López de Arjona explained to the monks that don Gonzalo had travelled to Avignon to meet the pope and to receive the document that certified his appointment as bishop. Nevertheless, on his way back to Segovia, don Gonzalo died while he was in Zaragoza. Accordingly, the just appointed bishop was buried in the Dominican monastery. Arjona’s intention was—as he declared—to carry the corpse of bishop don Gonzalo to the cathedral of Santa Maria, in Segovia, and to “take [him] or have taken to the abovementioned church of Santa Maria in said city of Segovia and there transfer or bury said body.”17 The words pronounced by Arjona when he was trying to retrieve the corpse of his relative illustrate how important it was for a family to have their dead members interred in the place where the message of “social memory” could be best transmitted. Although it seems don Gonzalo never managed to exert his authority over the bishopric of Segovia due to his unexpected death, his appointment as bishop was enough to make him significant, someone his descendants could be very proud of. This is why Fernando López de Arjona was so interested in taking his corpse to the cathedral of Segovia. The canon had his benefice in that cathedral and once the tomb for bishop don Gonzalo was finished, Arjona could proudly proclaim that the man who lay there was a relative of his. The bishop and his sepulchre constituted an emblem of the social status attained by this family, so the canon was reluctant for don Gonzalo’s mortal remains to stay in Zaragoza, where they were invisible for the only people—the inhabitants of Segovia—who could decipher correctly the message sent by his tomb. The dwellers of this Castilian city (and secondly his kin) were the only ones who could value the success gained by this bishop. Segovia and its citizens were the right context in which this family could send their message; a tomb anywhere else could have sent the very same message, but no one would have fully appreciated it. Besides the context of a sepulchre’s location, it was also important to maximize the tomb’s visibility to send its messages of “social memory” and “religious memory” successfully. Visibility consisted in the ability of the tomb to stand out among many others and to attract the attention of passers-by. Obviously, visibility depended on varied factors, such as the grave’s setting, its size, its design, and the decoration around it. Men and women of the Middle Ages combined all these elements and played with them in order to transmit their own message. We may note that the message of “religious memory” was more or less the same in all cases, because it entailed a call for intercession.

la Diócesis de Segovia. Noticias de los Obispos de Segovia desde sus orí�genes hasta nuestros dí�as,” Estudios segovianos, 97 (1998): 17–346. Another candidate is Gonzalo González de Bustamante, who was bishop of Segovia between 1389 and 1392 and was a renowned jurist: Bonifacio Bartolomé Herrero, “Don Gonzalo González de Bustamante, Obispo de Segovia (1389–1392),” Estudios segovianos, 96 (1997): 45–65; José Manuel Nieto Soria, Iglesia y génesis del estado moderno en Castilla (1369–1480) (Madrid, 1994), 200.

17  “Levar o fer levar a la sobredita eglesia de Santa Maria de la dita ciudat de Sogovia et alli translatar o soterrar el dicho su cuerpo.” From Zaragoza, Archivo Histórico de Protocolos Notariales de Zaragoza, Garcí�a Martí�nez Royo, register of 1391, fols. 14v–16r (Zaragoza, January 8, 1391), cited in Ana del Campo Gutiérrez, Rituales y creencias en torno a la muerte en Zaragoza durante la segunda mitad del siglo xiv (PhD diss., University of Zaragoza, 2010), 455–56.

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However, as far as “social memory” is concerned, messages could differ from one tomb to another or, at least, could present many nuances according to the deceased’s wishes. Some graves emphasized the union of kin, while others preferred to remark on the alliance between influential families to emphasize their power. Some tombs proclaimed the martial exploits of their dead occupants; others noted the honour of having served the king, while others referenced the liberal professions exercised by the deceased, and so on. The rest of this chapter analyzes the messages sent by medi­eval tombs and how they were achieved. To do so, we will examine some examples from Zaragoza, the capital of the Kingdom of Aragon. Studies on this subject show that many people preferred to be buried within their parish cemetery or inside their parish church.18 The reasons are multiple. Firstly, choosing to be interred elsewhere meant paying an extra amount of money, known as portio canonica, to compensate the parish for the loss of a tomb and the subsequent suffragia for the deceased.19 Secondly, inhumation in the parish church or its cemetery granted the dead the best context for messages of social and religious memory to be received and understood easily. The fellow parishioners were the deceased’s neighbours; they knew him or her well and, consequently, they were more inclined to raise a prayer for the dead and to interpret the tomb in the right way. The urban aristocracy were even more inclined to build their sepulchres within their parishes. In many European cities, parishes shaped the districts or the constituencies on which local government was based. For instance, in Zaragoza the members of the urban elite needed the support of their neighbours in the parochial assemblies if they wanted to hold public office in the Concejo or City Council.20 So, parishes were the foundations on which the oligarchies built their political power and this is why the elites had a pre18  Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà. Les hommes et la mort dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1320–vers 1480) (Rome, 1980), 165–70; Jean-Pierre Deregnaucourt, “L’élection de sepulture d’après les testaments douaisiens (1295–1500),” Revue du Nord 65, no. 257 (1983): 343–52 at 346; René Grevet, “L’élection de sepulture d’après les testaments audomarois de la fin du xve siècle,” Revue du Nord 65, no. 257 (1983): 353–60 at 354–55; Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, “Choisir un lieu de sépulture,” in À Réveiller les morts. La mort au quotidien dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, and Cécile Treffort (Lyon, 1993), 247–48; Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, La mort au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1998), 151; Marí�a Luz Rodrigo Estevan, Testamentos medi­evales aragoneses (La Muela, 2002), 81. 19  The portio canonica usually amounted to a third or a fourth of all the money the dead had bequeathed to religious and charitable activities in his or her last will. For instance, in Nî�mes the portio was equivalent to a third (Joseph Avril, “Mort et sepulture dans les status synodaux du Midi de la France,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux. La mort et l’au-delà en France méridionale (xiie–xve siècles), 33 (1998): 351), while it was a quarter in Zaragoza (Federico Rafael Aznar Gil, Concilios provinciales y sínodos de Zaragoza de 1215 a 1563 (Zaragoza, 1982), 138) and in Leon, a city in the Crown of Castile (Antonio Garcí�a y Garcí�a, ed., Synodicon Hispanum: iii, Astorga, León y Oviedo (Madrid, 1987), 288). 20  Marí�a Isabel Falcón Pérez, Organización municipal de Zaragoza en el siglo xv. Con notas acerca de los orígenes del régimen municipal en Zaragoza (Zaragoza, 1978). Susana Lozano Gracia, “Las parroquias y el poder urbano en Zaragoza durante los siglos xiv y xv,” En la España Medi­eval 29 (2006): 135–51.



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dilection for placing their graves in their parishes, particularly inside the parish church. The Medici family in Florence are a paradigmatic example, because they chose to be buried in their parish, the church of San Lorenzo.21 As far as Zaragoza is concerned, many patrician dynasties opted to be buried in their respective parishes, too. This was the case for the Palomar family, who were parishioners of San Gil (as a matter of fact, their house was just in front of the church’s main door). They acquired one of the key chapels, next to the high altar, so that all the family members could be interred there.22 As a consequence, anyone attending a mass in San Gil would easily see the Palomars’ chapel—and even their tombs—when looking at the priest. This burial place provided this family with the twofold visibility they were looking for: on the one hand, political visibility (they were buried in a place of honour, as befitting such an honourable family) and, on the other hand, visibility that stirred intercession (the more people saw a tomb, the more prayers the dead would receive to their benefit). The attitude of nobles towards the parish is not so clear. Some historians believe the higher up the social ladder, the less attached to the parish. They consider that the nobility tended not to have their graves in their parish churches, religious houses, or cemeteries.23 Other historians think that nobles could not relinquish their parish as their burial place because the parish was an ideal stage for their propaganda.24 The situation in Zaragoza was rather peculiar, because the nobles did not take part in the municipal government, since the most important public offices were held by the members of the local aristocracy of “citizens” or ciudadanos (the city was divided into “citizens”, “neighbours” or vecinos, and “inhabitants” or habitantes).25 So, nobles from Zaragoza could be less inclined to choose their parish as their burial place. Moreover, the high nobility tended to erect their memorials in their headquarters. For instance, the Martí�nez of Luna, one of the most important noble families in the Kingdom of Aragon, built their funerary chapel in the humble church of a little village called Pola.26 This was the most important feodum for the family and the wealth and social status of Martí�nez de Luna was rooted there. Placing their graves there served to proclaim their origins and the source of their power. 21  John Rigby Hale, Florence and the Medici. The Pattern of Control (Leipzig, 1983), 26, 29–31 and 42. 22  Ana del Campo Gutiérrez, “Catalina del Hospital: ciudadana por prestigio,” in Vidas de mujeres del Renacimiento, ed. Blanca Garí� (Barcelona, 2006), 44.

23  Nigel Saul, “The Gentry and the Parish,” in The Parish in Late Medi­eval England: Proceedings of the 2002 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Clive Burgess and Eamon Duffy (Donington, 2006), 243–60 at 259.

24  Christine Carpenter, “The Religion of the Gentry in Fifteenth Century England,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daviel Williams (Woodbridge, 1987), 53–74. Christine Carpenter, “Religion,” in Gentry Culture in Late Medi­eval England, ed. Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove (Manchester, 2005), 134–50 at 143.

25  Enrique Mainé, Ciudadanos honrados de Zaragoza. La oligarquía en la Baja Edad Media (1370–1410) (Zaragoza, 2006), 17–27. Enrique Mainé Burguete, “Infanzones contra ciudadanos: Luchas por el poder en la parroquia de la Magdalena (Zaragoza),” Aragón en la Edad Media 14–15 (1999): 941–54. 26  Del Campo, Rituales y creencias, 456.

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Sometimes, the location of a tomb was determined by religious reasons more than by political ones. Martí�n de Alpartir (d. 1381) was a well-known canon of the order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem who, among other jobs, had worked as a treasurer of the archbishop of Zaragoza, Lope Fernández de Luna (d. 1382). In his last will Alpartir decided to be buried in the chapter house of the monastery belonging to the canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre in the city. Martí�n de Alpartir was a benefactor of that institution and, so, wanted to remain linked to it after his death. The grave was merely covered by a simple tombstone. The tombstone depicted Martí�n of Alpartir in a realistic way (he was represented as a chubby, bald man, wearing the habit of his order, his head resting on a pillow).27 To be placed next to it, Alpartir ordered a great altarpiece painted by Jaume Serra (d. ca. 1390) of the Resurrection of Christ and the Last Judgement; here the donor is also represented, although in a more idealized manner.28 In this case, the true value of the sepulchre had to do not with its cost or with its expensive altarpiece, but with its location in the chapter house, because the canonesses would see the tomb every time they gathered there and would raise a prayer for their benefactor. Chapter houses were valuable—and expensive—burial places, but other monastic locations were too. For instance, in 1399 Alfonso Pescador, “citizen” of Zaragoza, signed a contract for his tomb to be built in the Prior’s Chapel of the Augustinian friary.29 This chapel was reserved for the friars’ graves. Consequently, intercession was guaranteed for Pescador, for the friars would see his sepulchre and pray for his soul whenever they visited a fellow deceased friar. However, this chapel had a significant disadvantage: lay people could not easily visit it and, so, could not readily see Pescador’s tomb. This prevented him sending the message of “social memory” that was so important for members of the urban elite. Probably, this is one of the reasons that made him change his mind and cancel the contract (the other reason being the delay in the construction of the cloister where the chapel was located). Finally, in 1401 Alfonso Pescador decided that his tomb would be placed in the presbytery of St. Mary Magdalene’s church, his parish church.30 In this new location his tomb would be very visible, so visible that it would obtain a “true shower of prayers” (verdadero baño de oraciones), as art historian Isidro Bango put it.31 Moreover, any grave in St. Mary Magdalene’s presbytery would benefit from the fact of being ad sanctos, that is, close to a saint’s sepulchre or close to the relics

27  Marí�a del Carmen Lacarra, “Edad Media,” in Las necrópolis de Zaragoza (Zaragoza, 1991), 237–40.

28  Marí� a del Carmen Lacarra, Primitivos aragoneses en el Museo Provincial de Zaragoza (Zaragoza, 1970), 27–40. Carlos de Odriozola y Grimaud, Monasterio del Santo Sepulcro de N. S. Jesucristo de Zaragoza. Memorias históricas referentes al mismo monasterio perteneciente a la orden del Santo Sepulcro, único en España. Contiene documentos referentes a su fundación en el siglo xiv y demás hasta nuestros días (Zaragoza, 1908), 25. 29  Zaragoza, Archivo Histórico de Protocolos Notariales de Zaragoza, Juan Blasco de Azuara, protocol of 1399, fol. 278r-v (Zaragoza, May 6, 1399).

30  Zaragoza, Archivo Histórico de Protocolos Notariales de Zaragoza, Juan Blasco de Azuara, book of last wills of 1401, fols. 1r–15r (Zaragoza, February 25, 1401). 31  Isidro Bango Torviso, “El espacio para enterramientos privilegiados en la arquitectura medi­ eval española,” Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte 4 (1992): 93–132 at 117.



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kept there. The proximity to a saint’s remains would provide the dead with the saint’s precious intercession. Moreover, a tomb in the presbytery or very close to an altar would benefit from the masses celebrated in that particular altar. The eucharistic service was another means of intercession, one of the suffragia— if not the most important of them—that helped speed the deceased to heaven. The tomb of archbishop Lope Fernández de Luna (d. 1382) is the perfect example of how to assemble the best kind of intercession. The archbishop built a new chapel attached to the cathedral’s apse, but outside the cathedral. This new chapel was almost an independent building, because Lope Fernández de Luna wanted it to act as a parish church for those who lived in the cathedral district. The new chapel or parish was dedicated to St. Michael and had only one nave. The archbishop’s sepulchre was placed in the presbytery, attached to the north wall, and was sculpted by Pere Moragues.32 This way, the tomb enjoyed maximum visibility, promoting both messages of “social” and “religious memory.” In addition, the tomb’s location allowed the archbishop to benefit from the many masses said daily in the only altar of the chapel. But what happened when someone could not afford a visible and prestigious burial place? How did this person manage to express “social” and “religious memory” through his or her tomb? Clearly by catching the attention of passers-by. A tomb that was in a corner or surrounded by many others needed to be showy, even flashy. In 1382 the squire Juan Doria of Buesa dictated his last will. He wished to be buried in the cloister of the Carmelite friars in Zaragoza. In addition, he ordered that his grave should be painted, first in green, then decorated with many other colours over the green foundation. The squire indicated that his sepulchre should serve to “commemorate [lit.: make memory of] the Doria” and “in honour of the Doria and my relatives.”33 Such a colourful sepulchre would shine like a lighthouse in a sea of tombs and, thus, the onlookers could not help gazing upon it. Another way of increasing a tomb’s visibility involved placing decorative elements around it. An altarpiece like the one Martí�n of Alpartir installed next to his tomb would be a suitable choice, but there were some other options like a marker on a wall nearby, a slab, a brass, a statue, a wooden or metal cross, and so on.34 We can add too the presence of flags and banners, as well as arms and pieces of armour. Despite the fact that these were military symbols and, so, associated with the nobility, many other people ordered them to be hung near their sepulchres. For example, the jurist Martin López de Lorbes, 32  Lacarra, “Edad Media,” 217–24. É� mile Bertaux, ed., Exposición retrospectiva de Arte: 1908 (Zaragoza, 1910), 263; Andrés Ivars, “El mausoleo de la infanta doña Teresa de Entenza en el convento de San Francisco por el escultor Pere Moragues,” Archivo Íberoamericano, 13 (1926): 245–50. Anselmo Gascón de Gotor, La Seo de Zaragoza. Estudio histórico-arqueológico (Barcelona, 1939), 98–101. Francesca Español Bertrán, “Sicut ut decet. Sepulcro y espacio funerario en la Cataluña bajomedi­eval,” in Ante la muerte. Actitudes, espacios y formas en la España medi­eval, ed. Jaume Aurell and Julia Pavón (Pamplona, 2002), 95–156 at 126. 33  “Fazer memoria de Doria, facer bien pora honor de Doria e de mis parientes.” From Zaragoza, Archivo Histórico de Protocolos Notariales de Zaragoza, Garcí�a Martí�nez Royo, book of last wills of 1382, fols. 12v–14r (Zaragoza, May 14, 1382). 34  Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medi­eval England, 1066–1550 (London, 1997), 146–47.

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merely a citizen of Zaragoza (not a noble),35 had his chapel in Santa Marí�a la Mayor’s church decorated with banners, shields, and horse blankets.36 Apart from serving to identify the deceased through the coat of arms represented on them, military items were a powerful instrument of propaganda. This is why Duke Cosimo I (1519–1574) insisted that the Popolo and the Parte Güelfa banners in the church of Santa Croce in Florence be eliminated, as well as the banners, shields, and armour that were placed over the tombs of two well-known republicans.37 Many years before, in 1385, the clergymen from the cathedral of Florence were alarmed by the excessive number of flags and ordered their removal.38 But their proliferation did not stop and when the German traveller Hieronymus Münzer (d. 1508) arrived in Barcelona at the end of the fifteenth century, he greatly enjoyed the show of “uncountable flags” that decorated the churches there.39 Probably, the most famous example of a tomb decorated with this kind of military paraphernalia is that of Edward of Woodstock (1330–1376), the Black Prince, in Canterbury. His sepulchre was located next to Thomas Becket’s shrine, so that the Prince enjoyed a burial ad sanctos (later on, Becket’s shrine was destroyed by order of Henry VIII).40 Edward was the son of Edward III, but never succeeded to the throne. His burial instructions were precise: a gilt bronze effigy was made showing the prince in a tunic with lions emblazoned on it, his feet with spurs, and his hands in a position of prayer. Above the effigy, a tester was hung and over the tester were placed a sword and its scabbard (the sword is now missing), a pair of gauntlets, a surcoat, a shield, and a helm with a crest in the shape of a leopard. These exhibition arms and pieces of armour were generally made of wood or of lame metal, because they were not going to be used in a real combat.41 Armorial displays served to express the message of “social memory,” reminding the community of the deceased, his deeds, and keeping his memory alive among his neighbours and descendants. But this message was intrinsically linked to that of “religious memory” and the Black Prince’s sepulchre is an excellent example of how the two combined. Around his effigy a long epitaph was carved. This epitaph summarized the message of “religious memory” the tomb wanted to send to spectators. It includes various funerary topoi, like that of memento mori, that of tu quoque, and that of ubi sunt. The epitaph finishes by asking God to have mercy on the Prince’s soul.42 35  Mainé, Ciudadanos honrados, 220.

36  Del Campo, Rituales y creencias, 474.

37  Sharon T. Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 1992), 35. 38  Strocchia, Death and Ritual, 91–92.

39  Hieronymus Münzer, Viaje por España y Portugal (1494–1495) (Madrid, 1991), 15.

40  Chris Given-Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward III and the Royal Funeral Ceremony in Latemedi­eval England,” English Historical Review, 124, no. 507 (2009): 257–82 at 278–79.

41  Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500–c. 1800 (London, 1991), 68.

42  The full text of the epitaph reads as follows: “Whoever you be that passe by / where this body interred do lie, / Understand what I shall say / as, at this time, speak I may; / such as you art,



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In fact, many tombs included an epitaph in which the words Orate pro anima were present.43 This was a direct exhortation to the viewer to intercede with God on behalf of the dead person. The purpose of “religious memory” could not be more clearly exposed and merged with the expression of “social memory” sent by other elements in tombs. In 1509 a canon of St. George’s Chapel, in Windsor, summed this up when he explained that he wanted a brass “with a scripture under shewyng who lyeth here to the intent I may be the more remembered helpen and relevid by the helpe and prayers of good charitable cristen men.”44 In other words, he wanted to be remembered and helped out of Purgatory. This chapter aimed to provide evidence of the role played by graves in medi­eval society. Unpublished sources—mainly, notarial acts—from Zaragoza have been presented and compared with other European evidence. The saying “out of sight, out of mind” is a good motto for graves in the Middle Ages: if a tomb was not located in the right context, any message sent by it would inevitably get lost. But when a sepulchre was located in the right context, visibility had to be maximized. Choosing a prominent area in the church or the cemetery, decorating the sepulchre in a flashy way or surrounding it with banners, pieces of armour, and arms were some of the methods employed to draw attention. A tomb needed to be seen so it could send its messages of “social” and “religious memory.” A grave that remained hidden or unseen likely consigned the dead to oblivion.

such was I, / such as I am, shall you be / little did I think on death, / long as I enjoyed my breath, / Great riches here I did possess, whereof I made great nobleness. / I had gold, silver, wardrobes, land, / great treasures, horses, houses grand. / But now a caitiff poor amb I, / deep in the ground / my beauty great is all quite gone, / my flesh is wasted to the bone. / My house is narrow now and throng, / nothing but truth comes from my tongue / and if you should see me this day, / I do not think, but you would say, / that I had never been a man, / so much altered now I am. / For God’s sake pray to the heavenly King, / that he my soul to heaven would bring. / All they that pray, and make accord / for me, unto my God and Lord, / God place them in his Paradise, / wherein no wretched caitiff lies” (Tu qui passez oue bouche close, / par la ouce corps repose, / entent ce qe te diray: / Sycome te dire le say. / Come tues autiel fu, / tu seras tiel come io fu. / De la mort ne pensai ie mie, / tant come iauoy la vie. / En tre auoi grand richesse / Sout icy fis grand noblesse / Terre mesons et grand tresor / Draps, chiuaux, argent et or / Mes ore su ieo poures et chetifs / Perfond en la tre gis / Ma grand beaute est tout alee, / Ma char est toute gastee. / Noult est estroit ma meson; / En moy na sy verite non. / Et si ore me veisses, / Ie ne quide pas qe vous deisses. / Qe ie eusse onges home este / Sys u ie ore tant change. / Pur dieu priez au celestien roy / Qe mercy ait de l’alme de moy. / Tout ceulx qi pur moy prieront, / Ou a dieu maccorderont: / Dieu les mette en son paraydis / Ou nul ne peut estre chetifs). Cited from Weever, Antient Funeral Monuments, 8–9. 43  Saul, English Church Monuments, 121; Nigel Saul, Death, Art, and Memory in Medi­eval England: The Cobham Family and their Monuments, 1300–1500 (Oxford, 2001), 244. 44  Saul, English Church Monuments, 121–22.

Chapter 13

WILLS, TOMBS, AND PREPARATION FOR A GOOD DEATH IN LATE MEDI­EVAL PORTUGAL MARTA MIRIAM RAMOS DIAS

In the Middle Ages, funerary art was used by the upper social groups as a form of immortalization in the earthly world. The main concern was to be forever present in the memory of the living so they could intercede for the soul of the deceased. According to the ways Christianity was expressed in the Late Middle Ages, success in the afterlife required several rituals, such as masses, so the departed could ascend more rapidly to Eternal Salvation. To ensure this happened, long before death, testaments served to predetermine how the ante-mortem procedures, burial, and post-mortem rituals should take place and, in exchange, the Church would receive a significant part of the testator’s possessions. The testaments related to items of funerary art reveal the anguish caused by the idea of disappearance over time. A testament, or will, is an official document that was often written long before death, due to the omnipresence of death in medi­eval daily life. It would describe not only practical matters related to the disposition of possessions, but also lay down the manner in which the deceased wanted to be remembered, trying to prolong their memory for as long as possible. In these documents, certain formulae concern the fate of the soul (pro commendatio anima) and the structure of prayers, not only daily but also on special occasions. This is the case for the so-called Dies natalis, the day of rebirth to an eternal life, which is why this expression is used; calling it a birthday even though it referred to the day of death. Unlike in the ancient world, prayers were for the dead and not to the dead. This practice featured so heavily in medi­eval attitudes towards death that funeral scenes on tombs often depicted mourners. The recumbent effigy—representing the image of the deceased person—and the sarcophagus or chest as a whole were to form a monumentum comprising the principal roles the person played while living and reflecting the idea of a deep believer with boundless faith.

Wills Demanding Rituals

Let us analyze attitudes towards death, the Liturgy of the Dead, testamentary documents, and funerary art simultaneously. Research still emphasizes that medi­eval testaments are a good insight into religious feelings and practices: “The will, a manifest of the Marta Miriam Ramos Dias ([email protected]) is Investigador Integrado in Art History at the Universidade do Porto, Portugal.

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wills of the living to one’s own death, becomes, in the study of Middle Ages, an element to take into consideration if one wants to analyze the religious feeling of this period.”1 Wills certainly present elements that allow us to understand attitudes towards death. My research is in Portuguese and Castilian testaments from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, examining the main fears of the testators regarding the afterlife. They show a great concern for the final arrangements in both material and spiritual matters. These documents are filled with references to moments which are not part of the official liturgy itself but are paraliturgical. I use this term to refer to aspects that are not in the specific liturgy for the dead but that help and promote it, such as the institution of chapels, physical or not, requests for intercession for the soul, so-called actions for the soul (pro commendatio animae or pro remedio animae), and commands for perpetual rituals. We should take into account that the term chapel in the medi­eval sense meant the institution of perpetual suffrages for the sake of the founder’s soul, who would have donated part of his estate to the church where the chapel was established. In some cases, apart from the aforementioned rituals, it can also mean the construction of an altar or chapel in which suffrages are celebrated, thus corresponding to an architectonic and/or artistic programme.2 The paraliturgical moments focus essentially on rituals to be performed perpetually to keep the deceased alive in the memory of the living. This need to perpetuate their memory results from the need of intercession for the soul through prayers. Praying was a crucial means to minimize the time spent in purgatory, which was imagined to be as daunting as hell, though it held the hope of being finite. Purgatory was described as a place “where the cruelty and harshness of the punishments are so great that no human tongue can describe it.”3 The testamentary will was a binding religious act imposed by the church under the threat of excommunication.4 It aimed to achieve two goals: one, the organization of family life, and the other, securing a place in heaven.5 As Teófilo Ruiz stated, testaments were used as a way to negotiate the salvation of the soul.6 Jacques Le Goff called it a “passport to heaven” and Philippe Ariès, a “safe-conduct on earth.”7

1  El testamento, manifiesto de las voluntades de los vivos para con la muerte propia, se convierte, en el estudio de la Edad Media, en un elemento a tener en cuenta si se quiere analizar el sentimiento religioso de la época. Cited from Maria Dolores Barral Rivadulla, “De Historia, Arte y Arqueo­logí�a. Sueños en piedra en La Coruña Medi­eval,” Semata 17 (2006): 115–38 at 119.

2  Philippe Ariès, O Homem perante a morte (Mem Martins, 2000), 212–13; see also Elisa Maria Domigues da Costa Carvalho, “A fortuna ao serviço da alma, da famí�lia e da memória, através dos testamentos dos arcebispos e dignatários de Braga na Idade Média (séculos XII–XV),” Lusitania Sacra ser. 2, 13–14 (2001–2002): 15–40 at 29–30.

3  Teofilo F. Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth. The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150–1350 (Prince­ton, 2004), 28.

4  Marta Cendón Fernández, “El obispo ante la muerte en la Castilla de los Trastámara,” Archivo Ibero-americano 58 (2007): 677–708 at 690.

5  Marta Cendón and M. Dolores Barral, “Donantes y promotores: su imagen en la plástica gótica gallega,” Semata 10 (1998): 389–420 at 391. 6  Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth, 28.

7  Ariès, O Homem perante a morte, 226.

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We can easily find examples of such paraliturgical measures across late medi­eval testaments. Nevertheless, I wish to present some cases from the fourteenth-century cathedral of Lamego showing, among other measures, the founding of chantries for taking care of the souls of the dead.8 Nicolau Peres, dean of the cathedral of Lamego, instituted the chantry of St. Marinha for the sake of his soul and the souls of his parents in September 1299. In that chapel two chaplains were to celebrate the canonical hours and ensure that a lamp was lit night and day for eternity.9 By his side, Peter Peres of Távora, canon in Lamego, instituted the chapel of St. Mary Magdalene in the cathedral in May 1300. Like Nicolau Peres, he also requested the services of two chaplains, who had to sing and celebrate masses, but also keep a lamp lit at all times.10 In a document dated the same day, May 1, 1300, the same clergyman founded another chapel, this one dedicated to St. Peter, requiring “that chapel be kept for ever and that mass be sung in it every day and the other [offices] said comprehensively and be maintained and that a lamp be lit day and night for ever.”11 The importance of light in the liturgical and paraliturgical is obvious. The constant presence of light in funerary rituals led Jacques Chiffolleau to talk of the “liturgy of the light.”12 According to Richard Marks, light ensured active participation of the saints painted or sculpted inside the churches.13 The importance of the image of a saint could be determined by the amount of light he or she had around them. Specific objects to provide light and other objects to ensure the existence of light were some of the most important elements referred to in wills, because they were crucial for the development of the rituals. In the Testamenti Ecclesiae Portugaliae, a compilation of one hundred and fifty-one wills by clergymen,14 we find the testament of Domingos, archdeacon of Braga, who founded a chapel: Constitute a chapel in the same church of Braga and institute perpetual chaplains for the archbishop and chapter of the same church to celebrate the soul of the archbishop of Braga, Estêvão, who is alive and for my soul.15

8  Aní� s io Miguel de Sousa Saraiva, “A Sé de Lamego na primeira metade so século XIV (1296–1349)” (MA thesis, Univ. Leiria, 2003).

9  “May those chaplains light a lamp that burns day and night in front of the chapel […] keep it that way forever” (Que esses capelães façam alumear hua lanpada que arda dia e de noite ante essa capela […] mantenham-na asy pera sempre). Cited from Saraiva, “A Sé de Lamego,” 451.

10  “I command that these chaplains have one lamp always lit” (Mando que estes capellães tenham hua lampada sempre alumeada). Cited from Saraiva, “A Sé de Lamego,” 456. 11  “Manter essa capella pero todo sempre e que cantem en ela cada dia missa e digam has outras compridamente e per seer hy mantehuda e alumeada hua lampada de diia e de noite pera todo sempre.” Cited from Saraiva, “A Sé de Lamego,” 457.

12  Jacques Chiffolleau, La comptabilité de l’Au-delà. Les hommes, la mort et la réligion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1320–vers 1480) (Rome, 1980), 282. 13  Richard Marks, Image and Devotion in Late-medi­eval England (Stroud, 2004), 162.

14  Maria do Rosário Barbosa Morujão, ed., Testamenti Ecclesiae Portugaliae (1071–1325) (Lisbon, 2010).

15  “Constituatur una capellania in ipsa ecclesia Bracharensi et instituatur ibi capellanus perpet­

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As elsewhere, he also requested the perpetual services of chaplains as caretakers of his soul and intercessors for the soul of the current archbishop of Braga. The request to intercede for the soul of archbishops, contemporary or not of the deceased, reflects an imposition by the church to pray for the souls of dead archbishops.16 Expression of episcopal power resides in the institution of a funerary chapel and in the signs of the founder’s status with which they are represented. Many other cases highlight requests for intercession and references to the preparation of the paraliturgical rituals. In the will of Godinho, archbishop of Braga, dated July 31, 1188, he left to the Church material possessions to obtain his own eternal salvation, and that of his parents and brother: “I grant to the same church my property in Ulvaria for my soul and for the souls of my parents, I, Lord Gomizo […] light one lamp in the same church for the soul of my parents, my brother and me.”17 Interestingly, he considered light a means of intercession for souls. Apart from requests for souls and illumination, masses are another crucial element in ensuring the ascent of the soul into heaven. In all the wills seen so far, the testators ordered several masses, not only on the day of their death, but in the days following the funeral, and different practices during the year or on special occasions. A very popular form was the trental, a series of thirty masses celebrated on consecutive days aiming for the release of the soul from purgatory. The best option was an eternal practice of masses for the dead. This was the intent of the above-mentioned Nicolau Peres when he instituted his chapel and determined the functions of the chaplains to “sing every day in that chapel the hours of the dead and the hours of the day for the ones that I have missed so they will never be lost, not even those masses.”18 In the same line, he left his breviary to the chapel in order “to pray the hours in that chapel.”19 The Testamenti offer many references to anniversary masses. The will of Estêvão Soares da Silva, archbishop of Braga, dated August 5, 1228, is interesting because he gave large amounts for permanent lighting in particular chapels in the cathedral and for some clergy to offer, for eternity, two daily masses for his soul plus other prayers on specific days. These included the daily prayer of a Response in front of his tomb, which had to be blessed with holy water, and an annual procession of the canons to his tomb on Saint Michael’s day: And give each year, on the day of St. John the Baptist, twelve pieces of gold for three lit lamps, one located in one of the main altars, a second in front of the altar of St. Mary

tuus per archiepiscopum et capitulum ejusdem ecclesie qui celebret pro anime domni Stephani Bracharensis archiepiscopi qui nunc est et pro mea.” Cited from Morujão, Testamenti Ecclesiae Portugaliae, 55–56. 16  Domigues da Costa Carvalho, “A fortuna ao serviço,” 29.

17  “Mando etiam ipsi ecclesie hereditatem de Ulvaria pro anima mea et pro anima fratis mei domni Gomizo […] illuminant unam la[m]padam in ipsa ecclesia pro anima patris mei et fatris mei et mea.” Cited from Morujâo, Testamenti Ecclesiae Portugaliae, 41. 18  “Cantem cada dia en sa capela as oras dos mortos e as oras do dia por aquelhas que eu perdi en guissa que nunqua se percam nem essas missas.” Cited from Saraiva, “A Sé de Lamego,” 451. 19  “Per que ressem essas oras en essa capela.” Cited from Saraiva, “A Sé de Lamego,” 451.

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Magdalene, another in front of the tomb of the blessed saint and martyr, Geraldo, that it be always lit by day and night, paid by the treasury of Braga like others that illuminate the church of Braga […]. And give fifty pieces of gold for two chaplains to celebrate daily two masses for my soul and both together must go to my monument [tomb] with holy water and say a Response and give fifty pieces of gold annually for the office of Terce to the same chaplains on the Feast of St. John continuously until the next same feast day. Also on the feast of St. Michael give annually forty pieces of gold to the same canons to buy wheat and bread enough for a year. And on the day of St. Michael the canons must perform for the sake of my soul the celebration of all (canonical) hours during ten consecutive days without interruption and process to my monument.20

The will of archbishop Estêvâo da Silva is particularly detailed. He left no margin for error, covering all aspects of the rituals: obsequies, place of burial, prayers, masses, chaplains, processions, light, alms, and anniversaries. These detailed measures and the imposition of such ostentatious acts as the daily preaching in front of the tomb and its blessing or the annual procession underlined interesting traits. On one side, a religion that stressed the fear of eternal condemnation and highlighted the accumulation of acts to secure eternal salvation; on the other, a preoccupation with eternal life not only in heaven but also on earth through memory. Everybody would remember him if his tomb was eternally honoured. A rich burial was not enough; rituals took on the purpose of maintaining eternally the memory of the dead among the living. Maintaining eternal life and eternal memory became related to individual wealth. Moreover, funeral commemorations were also mentioned in wills because a funeral was above all a public act where the significance and glory of a particular person were shown. Much of this visibility resided in the tomb that immortalized the deceased, their status on the sarcophagus, and their recumbent portrait.21

Tombs Representing Rituals

In Portugal and Galicia, tombs representing rituals of the dead included liturgical and paraliturgical moments. Examples are the administration of the viaticum and the last rites on the tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, as well as processions showing different types of clergy and mourners, and objects used in the rituals, such as the proces-

20  “Item dabit in die Sancti Johannis Babtiste quolibet anno duodecim aureos ad tres la[m] padas illuminadas unam altare majus, alteram ante altare Sancte Marie Magdalene, alteram vero ante sepulcrum Beati Geraldi santissimi confessoris under sempre illuminetur de die et de nocte per thesaurium Bracarensem preter omne alias que illuminantur in ecclesia Bracarensi […]. Item dabit quinquaginta aureos duobus cappellanis qui cotidie celebrent du[a]s missas pro anima mea et ambo similiter si fieri potest veniant ad monumentum meum cum aqua benedicta et responsorio vel uterque per se et istos quinquaginta aureos dabit annuatim per tercias anni ipsis capellanis a festo Sancti Johannis usque ad sequens festum ejusdem. Item in festo Sancti Michaelis annuatim dabit quadraginta aureos ipsis canonicis de quibus aureis ement tricticum ut habeant inde panem per annum quantum suffecerint. Et canonici a die Sancti Michaelis usque ad decem dies sequentes continuos facient annuatium pro anima mea totas horas veniendo cum processione ad monumentum meum.” Cited from Moujâo, Testamenti Ecclesiae Portugaliae, 59–67.

21  Marta Cendón, “La muerte mitrada. El sepulcro episcopal en la Galicia de los Trastámara,” Semata 17 (2006): 155–78 at 163.

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Figure 13.1: Tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monastery of Alcobaça (© Mosteiro de Alcobaça).

Figure 13.2: Tomb of Inês de Castro, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monastery of Alcobaça (© Mosteiro de Alcobaça).

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Figure 13.3: Tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monastery of Alcobaça (© Mosteiro de Alcobaça).

sional cross, for example, in the tombs of the unknown bishop (commonly called Obispo desconecido) and of Lope de Fontecha. Nevertheless, this kind of imagery is rare and most tombs present figures considered essential in the icono­graphic programme of the sarcophagus: the theme of Christ and the apostles, as in the case of the tomb of Archbishop Gonçalo Pereira. Research has shown that we cannot talk about the tomb of King Peter I without mentioning the tomb of Inês de Castro, since they are both part of the same artistic/ icono­graphic programme (see figures 13.1 and 13.2).22 These are probably the two most exquisite tombs in Portugal: true works of art due to their detailing and the gentle plastic expression on the face of each character. What interests us here is at the foot side (see figure 13.3) of the tomb of King Peter I.23

22  The tomb of Peter I is in the monastery of Alcobaça, along with the tomb of Inês de Castro’s posthumously crowned queen. Concerning the tombs of King Peter I and Inês de Castro, see Carlos Alberto Ferreira de Almeida and Mário Jorge Barroca, História da Arte em Portugal. O Gótico (Lisbon, 2002), 235–40; Francisco Pato de Macedo, “O descanso eterno. A tumulária,” in História da Arte Portuguesa. O “modo gótico” (séculos XIII–XV), ed. Paulo Pereira (Mem Martins, 1995–1997), 434–55; Urbano Afonso, O ser e o tempo. As idade do homem no gótico português (Lisbon, 2003). 23  Urbano Afonso, O ser e o tempo, 28–29.

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Figure 13.4: Tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, detail of the representation of the administration of the viaticum, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monastery of Alcobaça (© Mosteiro de Alcobaça).

Here, we have two representations, in the second of which we can see the administration of the viaticum (see figure 13.4), the king reclined on his death bed with his mouth open while one of the clergymen next to him gives him the body of Christ with both hands. On the same side of the tomb, to the right of this scene, is another representation quite similar to the previous one: again the king is in bed, this time sitting, and although the hands are severed, we can see that both the king and the clergy are praying (see figure 13.5). This moment has been considered to represent extreme unction, but in my opinion, there is not enough evidence to affirm this. These scenes together clearly express the king’s desire for a “good death.” Both tombs have been seriously damaged, and hands and heads have almost disappeared in every figure. This act of vandalism was deliberate because the heads and the position of the hands allow us to identify the persons represented, their degree of importance, and the relationships between them. Ignoring when this damage occurred or why, inflicting any kind of harm is very interesting because, if the building of the tomb expressed the desire to retain memory, damaging it in such a precise way demonstrates an explicit damnatio memoriae.24 In the neighbouring region of Galicia, two tombs, at least, present clear depictions of rituals of the dead. One of these tombs, in Ourense Cathedral, belongs to an unknown bishop, and probably dates from the fourteenth century (see figure 13.6). The recum� bent effigy is surrounded by a group of clergymen, each holding a book. On the inside wall of the arcosolium, a lower band depicts ten men facing the viewer. Above this band and covering the rest of the wall, Our Lady is shown holding the Holy Child Jesus, surrounded by four figures, the outside two being angels. We can see that the ten men are religious and, although they are wearing capes and holding books, all of them are holding the books in different positions, which gives an outstanding naturalism to the figures, as if they were alive and the actions were real, as if caught in the act. Surrounding the coffin itself, by the effigy’s feet and head, we see distinguished figures from the higher ranks of 24  Urbano Afonso, O ser e o tempo, 18–19.

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Figure 13.5: Tomb of King Peter I of Portugal, detail of the king and clergy at prayer, ca. 1358–1367. Alcobaça, Monas­tery of Alcobaça (© Mosteiro de Alcobaça).

Figure 13.6: Tomb of an unknown bishop, fourteenth century. Ourense, Cathedral of Ourense (© Catedral de Ourense).

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Figure 13.7: Tomb of an unknown bishop, detail of more distinguished figures meaning higher ranks of the church, fourteenth century. Ourense, Cathedral of Ourense (© Catedral de Ourense).

Figure 13.8: Tomb of Lope de Fontecha in the chapel of Saint Gregory, 1351. Burgos, Cathedral of Burgos (© Catedral de Burgos).

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Figure 13.9: Tomb of Lope de Fontecha in the chapel of Saint Gregory, detail of a real funeral taking place, 1351. Burgos, Cathedral of Burgos (© Catedral de Burgos).

Figure 13.10: Tomb of Lope de Fontecha in the chapel of Saint Gregory, detail of one of the clergymen holding a processional cross and another in an attitude of mourning, 1351. Burgos, Cathedral of Burgos (© Catedral de Burgos).

the church, easily identified by their decorated garments and liturgical implements. The angel by the feet of the recumbent holds a censer (see figure 13.7). Such tombs teach us how important it is to study the entire space surrounding the tomb. The tomb of Lope de Fontecha in the chapel of San Gregorio, in Burgos Cathedral, Castile, by an unknown artist and dated from 1351 is also noteworthy (see figure 13.8).25 The icono­graphic programme is similar to that of the unknown bishop in Ourense but it shows even greater naturalism and the figures are much better executed. Here, we can see a minister reading. The main action is taking place in the wall of the arcosolium above the effigy’s head (see figure 13.9), as if a real funeral were taking place. No char� acter looks alike: each figure is in a different position and doing something different. The 25  Francisco Javier Pérez-Embid Wamba, “La curación en los monasterios hispanos del siglo XII,” in Vida y muerte en el monasterio románico, ed. José Á� ngel Garcí�a de Cortázar (Aguilar de Campoo, 2004), 139–60 at 158.

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icono­graphy conveys unparalleled vividness. This tomb is even more compelling than the one of the unknown Galician bishop. It convinces us that we are actually witnessing a real moment taken from a funeral or another ritual concerning the death of the bishop. Indeed, at his feet, one of the clergymen is holding a processional cross and his neighbour appears to be mourning (see figure 13.10). The interest in depicting the funeral rites on the tombs themselves cannot be just anecdotal. The tomb images show a real interest in displaying a good death. The tomb, in all its richness, still had to fulfil the mission of guarding a permanent memory of the deceased, and his virtues, including religious practices of great transcendence, like the rituals that ensured the good death.

An Archbishop Ordering the Care of His Memory

In fourteenth-century Portugal one particular archbishop took great care in the arrangements required for a “good death.” Gonçalo Pereira was archbishop of Braga for twenty years and not only a religious man but a politician, diplomat, warrior, and an ambassador at the service of the king. He left a detailed document founding his own funerary chapel: “I order and establish my chapel of Santa Maria, which I built together with the San Gerardo church.”26 It is dated April 27, 1334.27 By the sixteenth century, Pero de Sousa, choirmaster of Braga cathedral and administrator of the chapel, ordered the translation of the document into Portuguese. This document is a cornerstone for studies on medi­eval funerary art because both the document and the chapel exist today. Maria Helena da Cruz Coelho shows that when the archbishop instituted the chapel, he was excessively thorough, handling issues like economic feasibility, internal regulations, administration, and the construction.28 One aspect of the document that particularly stands out concerns the formulae that make it very much like a will, especially the tropes of “confession” and “intercession” for the souls. In the formulas of confession, the bishop recognizes himself as a “miserable and ungrateful sinner” (misero e muito ingrato picador) and continues: I was absorbed in human affairs to which I applied my full strength and movements of my heart, and neglected and was careless in celebrating the divine rituals and other things that belonged to my position.29

26  “Ordeno e estatuo a minha capella de Samta Maria a qual eu fiz edificar a par da egreja de Sam Geraldo.” Cited from Maria Helena da Cruz Coelho, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira: Um querer, um agir,” in IX Centenário da dedicação da Sé de Braga Congresso Internacional. Actas (Braga, 1990), 389–462 at 446. 27  Cruz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 389.

28  Cruz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 409.

29  “Envolto nos humanos negouçios aos quaaes com mais forces apliquei os movimentos de meu coração non guardamdo seus preceptos e saudavees mandamentos fui negligente e remiso em celebrar os divinos obsequios e outras cousas que a meu ofiçio pertemcião.” Cited from Cruz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 389 and 445.

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In the formulae of intercession pro anima or the pro commendatio animae, Gonçalo Pereira ordered masses for the souls of many other important people: Pope John XXII, King Dinis, and King Alfonso IV, the former’s son and later king, as well as for Sancho, Bishop of Porto.30 He also ordered the celebration of several masses to relieve him of his sins on earth and beyond: For the soul of the Pope my lord and the renowned lord Dinis, king of Portugal and Algarve and the enlightened memory from whom I received many goods and from the enlightened Alfonso now king of Portugal and Algarve for his sons and other kings over time that may descend from him [Alfonso IV].31

Regarding the requiem service, the archbishop asked for it to be performed by a group of six chaplains, three boys serving those chaplains, and a lay servant or slave to serve them and run the kitchen and do other things that they might need; the service would also rely on the participation of the canons of the cathedral. The chaplains had to conduct daily masses according to the canonical hours and the tradition of Braga at all four altars. The archbishop asked to be celebrated with: The Masses every day in the canonical hours and from the good fortunate Virgin and also of the deceased in the said chapel according to the custom of Braga in good and clean surplices […] in a voice not very loud and not very low the morning office and the other canonical hours through the day at the right time may be said in the said chapel as it is done in the said church.32

If they did not proceed as instructed, they were to be penalized for their failures. He requested from the chaplains faith, obedience, and rigour, and that they live a righteous life in a house adjoining the chapel. In that house, they were to eat, sleep, and live in community; they were not allowed to leave or be absent in any circumstance. The chaplains could not hold public offices or ecclesiastical benefits. As promised by the archbishop, they would be well compensated for all these requirements.33 As for the matter of illumination of the rituals, he ordered that there be enough olive oil for five lamps, two in front of the altar of the Virgin lit day and night, and the other three in front of other altars which had to be lit throughout the night. Also, there had to be enough wax for the lamps to be lit for an entire year, and sufficient wine, hosts, and incense for the masses. He ordered “on solemn occasions they may adorn and primp 30  Cruz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 447.

31  “Polas almas do ditto Papa meu senhor e do ilustre senhor Dom Denis rey que foi de Portugual e do Algarvee da esclarecida memoria de que reciby muitos beens e do esclarecido Dom Afonso aguora ylustre rei ed Portugual e do Algarve de seus filhos e dos outros reis que polo tempo forem nos dittos regnos e delle descendam.” Cited from Cruz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 409 and 446.

32  “Senhas missas cada dia as horas canonicas e da bem avemturada Virgem e tambem dos defuntos na dita capela segumdo custume de Bragaa em boas sobrepelizes e limpas […] em voz não muito alta nem muito baixa diguão na dicta capela ho oficio das matinas e asy diguão nella as outras horas canonicas de todo o dia aas horas e tempos devidos asi como os dizem na dyta egreja de Bragaa.” Cited from Cruz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 446. 33  Cruz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 410.

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Figure 13.11: Master Pero of Coimbra and Telo Garcia of Lisbon, Tomb in the chapel of Saint Mary, 1334. Braga, Cathedral of Braga (© Catedral de Braga).

with decent and honest ornaments and light lamps in the chapel and celebrate, and give lamps, hosts, wine, and water and incense for the masses and other divine services.”34 Gonçalo Pereira’s document for founding the chapel underlines his concerns with his place of burial and the post-mortem liturgy. The whole chapel obeys an icono­graphic programme imposed by the bishop. In the chapel, we find four altars, each devoted to a different figure: one dedicated to the Virgin Mary (as the archbishop stated, “so that she may intercede for me in front of her Son”);35 another to St. Andrew because he was a perfect apostle whereas the archbishop was not; another to St. Mary Magdalene (so that God may forgive his sins like he forgave hers; and the last to St. Lawrence and St. Vincent, to act as intercessors for the forgiveness of God. The tomb (see figure 13.11) is situated in the centre of the chapel. The work was started in 1334 by Master Pero of Coimbra and by Telo Garcia of Lisbon. The sculpture of the archbishop presents him at a “perfect” age, when he was at the peak of his life. That is how he wanted to be remembered. The sarcophagus warrants special attention. Let us focus on the right frieze of the sarcophagus where the archbishop decided to represent a requiem mass, solemnized by

34  “Orne e afeite os alatares com decentes e honestos ornamentos e acenda as lampas da cappella e minister e dee camdeas hostias vinho e augua e incenso pera as missas e outros divines oficios.” Cited from Cruz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 451.

35  “Pera que ella diante d Elle seja intercesora por mim.” Cited from Cuz, “O arcebispo D. Gonçalo Pereira,” 446.

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Figure 13.12: Master Pero of Coimbra and Telo Garcia of Lisbon, Tomb in the chapel of Saint Mary, right wall of the ark, 1334. Braga, Cathedral of Braga (© Catedral de Braga).

ministers, incense, and chants (see figure 13.12). According to Joaquim de Santa Rosa de Viterbo, requests for the celebration of official masses were quite common.36 These twelve figures symbolize such a mass and show how death could be solemnized for ever. The characters appear repeated in pairs, but not symmetrically, with their mouths open. The objects they hold lead us to believe they are undertaking different tasks inside the church. This scene clearly represents a moment of the liturgy of the dead, so the tomb becomes a mirror of reality and an eternalized desire. It is not as evident as in the tombs we have examined from Galicia, but this somewhat stylized intent is present. Incidentally, on one of the sides of the tomb of Isabella of Aragon (the “Holy Queen”), by the same artists who produced the effigy and sarcophagus of Gonçalo Pereira, we find a similar scene: a group of nuns symmetrical to Christ and the apostles. They are probably the religious who will care for the soul of the Holy Queen.

Conclusions

We have seen how people who took care in their wills and burials to detail their ceremonies post-mortem felt the need to immortalize themselves, their souls in heaven, and their memories on earth. Amongst the themes depicted in funerary art are those that aim to emulate reality and the themes of an invisible world where souls are at eternal rest. However, tombs cannot be studied in isolation from their context, because they 36  Joaquim de Santa Rosa de Viterbo, Elucidário das palavras, termos e frases que em Portugal antigamente se usaram e que hoje regularmente se ignoram: obra indispensável para entender sem erro os documentos mais raros e preciosos que entre nós se conservam (Lisbon, 1865).

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were part of a large and grandiose icono­graphic programme inside what were usually busy medi­eval churches. Icono­graphic and icono­logical analysis allows us to perceive the art piece as intended. Once contextualized, the consistency between the testamentary dispositions, liturgical and para-liturgical practices, and artistic depictions come to light. But together they reflect the strong late-medi­eval experience of a religion oriented towards overcoming death through eternal salvation. The strategies focused on heaven, via rituals and tombs, also guaranteed another reward: one’s permanent record on earth through commemoration.

Chapter 14

CEREMONIAL TOPO­GRAPHY IN THE CONSUETA ANTIGA OF THE CATHEDRAL OF MALLORCA ANTONI PONS CORTÈS

Tombs and burials

in medi­eval religious buildings could appropriate these spaces for the memory of the dead and their families. This chapter aims to identify an internal topo­graphy of the cathedral of Mallorca using a unique document created to organize the religious services for the eternal care and memory of the dead there.

Introduction

Until now, research on the medi­eval cathedral of Mallorca has focused on its construction, especially the work of Joan Domenge using fabric records of the fourteenth century, and others on later stages in its building.1 A broad consensus exists on the cathedral and the structures of the main mosque, which were taken over by Christians after the reconquest of Mallorca, and became a Gothic cathedral in the early fourteenth century.2 From an initially austere structure the cathedral of Mallorca took on its current form with three naves, part of a major promotional campaign by the crown involving prestigious architectural structures across its territory, both insular and continental, trying to legitimize a kingdom that could hardly be considered independent of the Crown of Aragon.3 To date we have few studies on funerary documentation or the socio-economic reasons prestigious families began to choose the Mallorcan cathedral as a place of eternal rest, instead of the prestigious cloisters or chapels of the nearby Franciscan and Dominican friaries. Fortunately, the cathedral archive conserves a number of wills that allow us to analyze how the deceased buried in the building managed their commemoration. 1  Joan Domenge i Mesquida, L’obra de la seu: el procés de construcció de la catedral de Mallorca en el tres-cents (Palma, 1997). Also, Jaume Sastre Moll, La Seu de Mallorca (1390–1430): la prelatura del bisbe Lluís de Prades i d’Arenós (Palma, 2007).

2  That does not mean that the mosque was destroyed before or during the building of the Gothic building, because it is documented that, in 1386, the choir was still located in the remains of that previous construction in the main nave. Jaime Villanueva, “Viaje a Mallorca,” in Viage literario, 22 vols. (Madrid, 1851), 21:96–97.

3  Joan Domenge i Mesquida, “La arquitectura en el reino de Mallorca, 1450–1550: impresiones desde un mirador privilegiado,” Artigrama 23 (2009): 185–239.

Antoni Pons Cortès ([email protected]) is Researcher in Art History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

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From the early fourteenth century different areas of the cathedral began to form a hierarchical funerary complex where celebrations dedicated to the memory of the deceased were carried out: countless anniversary masses, absolutions associated with these masses, or the ritual of sharing bread at the grave.4 The records of the anniversaries are detailed and identify the place where each tomb is located, so we can see how the thousands of burials were distributed around the cloister or the chapels of the cathedral by social origin or the size of their perpetual rents, turning the building into a monumental stone necro­logium5 and mirror of Mallorcan medi­eval society. A few privileged individuals secured their memories with ornate monumental tombs, linking a definite lineage to a particular liturgical space.6 Other witnesses to the piety of the deceased buried in the basement of the cathedral are seen in differentsized inscriptions painted on columns, floors, and slabs. These sepulchral inscriptions in Mallorca Cathedral did not relate to anniversary masses, but the emphasis on the foundation of anniversaries is peculiar in the Iberian peninsula to Catalonia.7 Checking these funeral inscriptions against obituary documentation allows us to unearth past dedications of spaces in the cathedral, the patronage of chapels by certain families, the existence of ephemeral architectural structures, and helps us understand the uses and meanings attached to locations that now have a different purpose.

The Consueta Antiga

The inventory of the Cathedral Archive of Mallorca offers a reference to the so-called Consueta Antiga, shelfmark CC 3403.8 This is a book of anniversaries, or obituaries, Llibre de la Pretiosa or capitulary. Its title is not misleading, for it is without doubt one of the oldest ceremonial manu­scripts of the cathedral.9 Its 184 folia are organized into a year-round calendar, defining the anniversaries that should be performed every day of the year. 4  Gabriel Llompart Moragues, “Pan sobre la tumba. Una nota de folklore funerario mallorquí�n,” Revista de Dialecto­logía y Tradiciones Populares 21 (1965): 96–102.

5  This analogy is taken from Daniel Rico Camps, “El claustro de San Pedro el Viejo de Huesca: Pascua, Bautismo y Reconquista,” Locvs Amoenvs 7 (2004): 73–97. 6  Gabriel Llompart Moragues, “La población medi­eval del subsuelo de la catedral,” in La Catedral de Mallorca, ed. Aina Pascual Bennàsar (Palma, 1995), 84 and 86. 7  Similar inscriptions are found in the south of France. Javier de Santiago Fernández, “Prayers for the salvation of the soul. Obituary in stone in Sant Pau del Camp monastery in Barcelona,” Anuario De Estudios Medi­evales 46, no. 2 (2016): 939–73.

8  José Miralles Sbert, Catálogo del Archivo Capitular de Mallorca, 3 vols (Palma, 1936), 1:613.

9  Francesc Fité, “Ritual i cerimònia a la Seu Vella de Lleida: les devocions, aniversaris i fundacions,” in Imágenes y promotores en el arte medi­eval. Miscelánea en homenaje a Joaquín Yarza Luaces, ed. Marí�a Luisa Melero, Francesca Español, Anna Orriols and Daniel Rico (Bellaterra, 2001), 373–90 at 375. Customaries in the Cathedral Archive of Mallorca include: Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3412, Consueta de Tempore, provisionally dated ca. 1360–63; Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3400, Consueta de Sacristí�a, compiled by Font i Roig in 1511; Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3411, Consueta de Sanctis; and Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, undated.

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Inherent to its nature as a book of anniversaries is a problem of chrono­logy, for it contains references to numerous different time-periods. The practical nature of the manu­script meant that its contents were being continually updated as new endowments and foundations were made to the cathedral. We cannot be certain this was the very first book of anniversaries, although references to the early foundation of the Gothic church and the number of different scribal hands suggests a long history.10 Neither does codico­logical analysis help to clarify its dating. The majuscule letters are similar to those that appear in another capitular manu­script housed in the cathedral, the Llibre Groc.11 Unfortunately, little is known of the dating of this book, but on the basis of references to several tombs located in the so-called new pillars in front of the chapels of St. Cecilia and St. Mary Magdalene, between the chapels of St. Blaise and St. Stephen, I would argue that it was begun in the late-fourteenth century. The construction history of the building allows us to offer this chrono­logy. Later entries are less problematic, as many refer to areas built in the mid-sixteenth century. In this chapter, I propose to use the Consueta Antiga as a source for understanding the medi­eval topo­graphy of the cathedral of Mallorca, a topo­graphy related to the memory of the deceased people buried within it. Similar studies of the relationship between liturgy and architecture have been done by Eduardo Carrero for the cathedrals of Zamora, Oviedo, Santiago de Compostela, and Salamanca; Francesc Fité and Francisco Castillón Cortada for the Old Cathedral of Lleida; and Jose Antonio Casillas for the Dominican house of San Pablo in Burgos.12 The usefulness of the information derived from these obituaries varies depending on the quality and accuracy of each entry, as well as the surviving medi­eval architecture of each of these churches. For Mallorca, the uncertain dating of the manu­script makes it difficult to establish the topo­graphy of the cathedral. The only way to take advantage of the information contained in these obituaries is to highlight the permanent structures referred to, and then use other documentary sources to complement and refine this topo­graphical analysis. The wording of the entries in the Consueta Antiga is almost always the same: the first part states the name, the amount of money donated for the anniversary, and how 10  Especially worthy of note is the anniversary of James II, who started the construction of the cathedral. 11  Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3413.

12  See the following publications of Eduardo Carrero Santamarí�a: Eduardo Carrero Santamarí�a, “La Capilla de los Arzobispos, el Tesoro y la Torre de don Gómez Manrique en la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela,” Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte 9–10 (1997–1998): 35–52; Eduardo Carrero Santamarí�a, La Catedral Vieja de Salamanca: vida capitular y arqui­ tectura en la Edad Media (Murcia, 2005); Eduardo Carrero Santamarí�a, “El claustro medi­eval de la catedral de Zamora: topografia y funcion,” Anuario Instituto de Estudios Zamoranos ‘Florián de Ocampo’ 23 (1996): 107–21; Eduardo Carrero Santamarí�a, “De la Catedral medi­eval de Ourense y sus inmediaciones: nuevas hipótesis sobre viejas teories,” Porta da aira: revista de historia del arte orensano 9 (2002): 9–30. See also Fité, “Ritual i cerimònia a la seu vella de Lleida”; Francisco Castillón, “Litúrgia funeral en el claustro de la Seu Vella de Lleida,” in Congrés de la Seu Vella de Lleida: Lleida, 6–9 març 1991, ed. Francesc Vilà and Imma Lorés (Lleida, 1991), 225–32; José A. Casillas, “Los enterramientos en el convento de San Pablo de Burgos,” Archivo Dominicano: Anuario 23 (2002): 219–306.

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the money is to be spent, referred to at this time as the vuitè and quint.13 With respect to information about the tomb itself, which can tell us about the layout of the cathedral, the conclusion of each entry states the location of the tomb in relation to the chapel in which it was placed, the closest altar, the nearest important burial, or other details about epi­graphy or heraldry. Moreover, the Consueta consistently mentions in which of the four areas of the cathedral they were located—that is, in the church, cloister, bell-tower, or cemetery. The site at which the anniversary was performed usually corresponds with the location of the burial, although some anniversaries were established for individuals who were not buried in the cathedral. In such cases, just as with canons and priests who were already buried in a specific tomb, the entry in the Consueta only mentions the place in which the anniversary—or at least the absolution—was to be performed.14

Heraldry in the Consueta Antiga

Coats of arms or crests of the various families buried in the cathedral have been used in some entries in the manu­script as topo­graphical references to help locate a specific tomb or site for the performance of an anniversary. In such cases, the entry usually verbally describes the arms, although occasionally the coat of arms appears crudely painted with red or black ink. Simply recording these fifteen coats of arms or senyals, all of which refer to a specific name and lineage, makes the Consueta an important historical source for fourteenth-century heraldry in Mallorca, given that almost nothing is known about this topic.15 Although these arms were originally used to commemorate specfic lineages, we cannot as yet find an exact correspondence between the heraldry depicted and the lineage of the individual entombed there. Sometimes, arms were used only as a reference point for locating the site of an anniversary. In other cases, the wording of the anniversary is ambiguous in its characterization of the exact relationship between the deceased individual and the heraldry found on the monument. We know from the books of burials from other sites that it was not unusual to reuse tombs that had previously belonged to another family, and that lack of space meant the heraldry on the monument was not changed. But in the case of our Consueta, we must keep in mind that it pertained to a large building less than a century old. It is doubtful that many tombs had been reused in that time, so many of these arms are likely directly related to the lineages with which they are associated, especially when the text specified the owner of the monument. Figure 14.1 shows these painted coats-of-arms, some published now for the first 13  The archive preserves records documenting the payment of vuitens, beginning in 1444.

14  We do not know where the common sepulcral Wessel for all the Cathedral canons was located during the thirteenth century. During the forteenth century, it was located in the Corpus Christi Chapel. In 1428, all of the remains were removed into a new tomb built by Guillem Sagrera in front of the choir. Sastre Moll, La Seu de Mallorca, 283. 15  For the heraldry of the Cathedral, see Pedro de Montaner, “Blasones y personas en la Catedral,” in La Catedral de Mallorca, ed. Aina Pascual Bennàsar (Palma, 1995), 327–40; Bartomeu Bestard, “L’heràldica medi­eval a la Seu de Mallorca,” Bolletí de la Societat Arqueológica Lul·liana 56 (2000): 79–88.

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Figure 14.1: Heraldic shields from the Consueta Antiga, fourteenth century. Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, Capbreus, còdexs i repetoris, 3403 (© Catedral de Mallorca, Palma).

time together with a lineage, although work still remains to be done to clarify and refine our understanding of the relationship between heraldry and lineage in fourteenth-century Mallorca. Among these coats-of-arms is the sole fully illuminated page in the entire manu­script, which depicts the arms of Count Jaume de Prades, constable of the Crown of Aragon, who in 1413 founded several anniversaries during the feast days of the Guardian Angel (Figure 14.2). His relationship to the royal family is signalled by the bars of his heraldry, and allows him to receive absolution in the same tomb as James II, facing the main altar.16 The other arms that are verbally rather than visually described in the Consueta entries are beyond the scope of this chapter and will form part of a future article. 16  “April 20. Anniversary of the very high and noble baron Don Jayme de Prades Constable of Aragon and admiral of Sicily, and his servant P. Secosta, Canon of Mallorca, whose anniversary is celebrated on the II post Dominica in albis, in which […] there is a solemn celebration for the Glorious Guardian Angel of the homeland. The responsible for the anniversaries and other distributions is obliged to give and distribute to the canons and priests in this way: first, before the second Vesper of the said dominica in albis of the Guardian Angel, the eight lessons of death and absolution in front of the main altar, by the king’s tomb. And he will give and distribute censers to the recipient priests ten shillings more than is customary. Item, following [the feast] to the Guardian Angel ten shillings more than it is customary. Item, a major mass with all the recipient priests who will be in the procession and mass, six pence more than is customary; and after mass, solemn absolution would

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Figure 14.2: Anniversary of Jaume de Prades, fourteenth century. Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, Capbreus, còdexs i repetoris, 3403, fol. 56v (© Catedral de Mallorca, Palma).

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The Chapel of St. Bernard

Thanks to the inventory of 1399, which places the various altars to the naves and chapels, it is possible to propose the location—always approximate—of the altars in the church during the late fourteenth century. The inventory’s description proceeds along a logical route through the cathedral. It begins with a detailed description of the main altar, and then turns to the Chapel of the Archangel Gabriel and continues around each of the altars on the Gospel (north) side. Once finished with this side, the inventory continues along the Epistle (south) side, going from the foot of the cathedral to the main altar. At the end of the document, outside the logical sequence just described we find a reference to the liturgical furnishings of the altar of the bell tower and the Chapel of St. Bernard, and a note remarks that they should be integrated into the text, after the description of the Chapel of St. Barbara. St. Bernard’s is the only chapel treated this way within the inventory, a fact overlooked by historians. The difference could be explained by the fact that the Chapel of St. Bernard was administered differently from the other chapels. It was overseen by the Confraternity of Sts Peter and Bernard, founded in the early 1390s, which built the chapel between 1393 and 1395.17 The exceptional status of this chapel could also be explained by the fact that the inventory put to one side chapels not located inside the church itself, but in other cathedral places, such as the cloister or bell tower. The chapel’s location outside the church is highly likely, given that each time the Consueta refers be done with two silver staffs of monsignor G. Fàbregues and four candles above the said king’s tomb. Item, the representative must make nine masses heard for the glory of God and the nine orders of the glorious angels to nine priests, the representative being one of them, if he wishes; one shilling to each priest and one shilling for the work of the responsible. These things were entrusted to the said P. Secosta for the honest chapter according to the letter from Iohan Riera, notary, July 18, 1413.” (A XX d’abril. Aniversari del molt alt e noble baró don Jayme de Prades Conestaba d’Aregó e almirall de Sacilia e pen P. Secosta canonge de Malorcha servidor seu la qual se celebra feria II post dominica in albis en lo qual […] se fa solempna festa pel Gloriós À� ngel Custodi patrie e és obligat lo procurador de la bossa dels aniversaris e altres distribucions de donar e distribuir als senyos de canonges e preveres en la forma sagüent: Primo se dóna ans de las segones vespres de la dita dominica in albis qui són del gloriós À� ngel VIII liçons de morts e ferse absolució denant l’altar maior sobra la tomba del senyor rey. E donarà e distribuirà lo dit procurador als preveres benifficiats incensseris ultra la porció acostumade X suous. Item denant següents qui són del dit Gloriós àngel X sous ultra la porció acostumade. Item missa maior a tots aquells preveres benifficiats qui seran a la prosessó e missa a cascú ultra la porció acostumada VI diners e sia feta absolució sollempna aprés la missa ab los II bordons d’argent de mosen G. Fàbregues e IIII ciris sobre la dita tomba del senyor rey. Item és tengut de fer [oir] lo dit procurador VIIII˚ missas a laor e glòria de Déu e dels nou ordres dels gloriosos À� ngels a VIIII preveres per alagidos del nombra dels quals sia I lo dit procurador si celebrar volrà e age cascú I sou e d’altre part lo dit procurador per son treball I sou. Les dites coses foren atorgades al dit P. Secosta per lo honrat capí�tol segons apar ab carta feta en poder d’en Iohan Riera notari a XVIII de iuliol any MCCCCXIII). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 56v.

17  The location of these tombs within the chapel was possible by 1393, when, on June 14, the chapel was granted to the Confraternity of the holders of benefices. Pedro Antonio Matheu, Capillas y retablos (Palma, 1955), 39. I would like to thank Francisco Molina for providing me with the dates of the different phases of construction of the chapel, which he will be publishing soon.

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to the Chapel of St. Bernard, it is never located within the church itself, while the entries about other chapels are specified inside the church. We know of endowments for the altar of St. Bernard by the fourteenth century,18 and the construction of the chapel in stone is indicated by the removal of some earlier structures located elsewhere in the cathedral.19 The former Chapel of St. Bernard gave its name to one of the two doors that connected the cloister with the church. The proximity of the door to the chapel would explain how the chapel got its name, and it was likely located in the wall that separated the church and cloister.20 So, the Chapel of St. Bernard lay outside the church itself but where a door opens onto the adjacent cloister.

The Off-Axis Bell Tower

It has not been possible to determine the exact chrono­logy of the construction of the bell tower. The first entries in the Llibre de fábrica i sagristia de la Seu, dated between 1327 and 1345, refer only to the repair and replacement of the bells, and the construction of a torn de massoles along with the supporting structures of these bells.21 Another documentary entry refers to the elimination of a mysterious arch in the bell tower itself, about which we know nothing.22 According to the Consueta Antiga, the bell tower had three altars, dedicated to saints Valentine, Nicholas, and Anthony, as well as one chapel that the Consueta explicitly describes as empty. Located in the north aisle, the tower must have been a source of some minor problems in the larger urban context, given that its great bulk is slightly off-axis from the rest of the cathedral. The logical sequence of construction tells us the chapels were built in sequence along the lateral aisles, and were sites of transition to the auxiliary dependencies of the cathedral. From some point near when the Consueta itself was written, the medi­eval Chapel of St. Anne gave onto the chapter house and one reaches the bell tower and its various altars from the Chapel of St. Catherine. 18  The initial endownments of the altar or Chapel of Saint Bernard are dated to 1323 and 1328, around the same time as construction work was taking place in the cloister.

19  Apparently, once the new chapel was constructed and furnished, it was decided to reuse the screen in a new location after the demolition of the earlier structure. 20  On the so-called Saint Bernard Door, see Sastre Moll, La Seu de Mallorca, 225.

21  Jaume Sastre Moll, El primer llibre de fàbrica i sagristia de la Seu de Mallorca (1327–1345) (Palma, 1994), 62.

22  “Item, pay this week, for seven days of carpenters who fixed the crane by the sea, which the masters should have changed to make the buttresses, to make the scaffolding and to disassemble the arch on part of the bell tower. Five shillings and six pence to each one. Total: £1 18s 6” (Item, pagui la dita semana, per VII jornals de fustes que adobaren la grua deves la mar, en ques devien mudar los mastres per fer los archs botaretz, hoc encara per fer bastiments e per desarmar larc de la part del cloquer. A rao de V s. VI d. Cascun, monten I lb. XVIII s. VI). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular Mallorca, Fàbrica Liber Datarum 1368, fol. 24. Cited by Marcel Durliat, L’Art dans le Royaume de Majorque (Toulouse, 1962); Marcel Durliat, L’art en el Regne de Mallorca, trans. Francesc de Borja Moll (Palma, 1989), 139.

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Figure 14.3: Canals for water of the Madî�na Mayûrqa during the caliphal period (figure by the author based on a map by Maria Magdalena Riera, with permission).

It is difficult to get a clear picture of the evolution of the building in these adjacent areas because references to the construction and development of this part of the cathedral are few, and difficult to interpret. If we analyze the urban context in relation to the bell tower, we read in the Codex Català del Llibre de Repartiment de Mallorca about three streets that framed the city’s mosque, but no references to the northern flank, which suggests that in this area there were other Islamic structures attached to the mosque.23 We know a bit more about the medi­eval layout of this northern aspect. First, Carrer del Deganat, only a small part of which street survives, but its right-angled shape appears to follow the orientation of the tower. Magdalena Riera and Gabriel Pons have suggested that during the Islamic era this was the only street where it was possible for water to 23  Gabriel Pons and Maria Magdalena Riera, “Excavacions arqueològiques a la Seu de Mallorca,” Bolletí de la Societat Arqueológica Lul·liana 44 (1988): 3–55, esp. 55.

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flow to the mosque, and that the bell tower would have been built parallel to the water channel (Figure 14.3).24 Next, we have a street named after the Pedró. The Pedró was a catafalque, or raised platform, used for the blessing of palms on Palm Sunday, where judgements by the Inquisition were announced, where penitents were absolved on Maundy Thursday, and where sermons were preached. It was located in the cemetery, apparently projecting somewhat, like a pulpit or balcony. According to Santiago Zaforteza Musoles, the medi­ eval Pedró street extended from the Pedró itself, from opposite the royal palace to the base of the bell tower. The notion that the street ended at the bell tower comes from a reference made by the historian Villanueva, who describes how the street was painted all the way to the bell tower to celebrate James III’s 1330 arrival at the cathedral. This passage does not guarantee that the street ended at that point, only that the paintings reached the main cathedral gateway.25 As regards the so-called Plaça de l’Almoina, we know of several public squares at the confluence of two or more streets, and public open spaces in front of the aljamas, known as Rahba.26 One of these squares is cited in a grant to the Dominicans for the construction of the monastery and its church, which refers to a grande platea in front of the Almudaina castle, at the end of Benaret Street—in other words, next to the aljama.27 The survival of this square throughout the medi­eval period is attested to by the visit of St. Vincent Ferrer to Mallorca, when the city’s Dominican church was too small for his preaching, necessitating the construction of a catafalque in the friary garden. The garden wall was destroyed to make room for the preacher’s audience, and the platform was built so people could see and hear the saint from the above-mentioned square, the royal castle, and all of the nearby streets.28 One of the entries in the Consueta Antiga refers to a tomb located “behind the St. Anne Chapel, in the street where the chapel drainpipe was built.”29 One possible interpretation of this entry is that the tomb was located outside the cathedral, attached high 24  Magdalena Riera and Gabriel Pons, “Algema, zo es la Seu bisbal,” in La catedral de Mallorca, ed. Aina Pasqual (Palma, 1995), 19; Magdalena Riera, Evolució urbana i topogràfica de Madîna Mayûrqa (Palma, 1993), 35. This street takes its name (deganat) from the office of the dean, whose house was number 16 along the street. Diego Zaforteza, La ciudad de Mallorca. Ensayo históricotoponímico, 5 vols (Palma, 1989), 3:210–11.

25  Zaforteza, La ciudad de Mallorca, 4:14. For James III’s visit, see Villanueva, “Viaje a Mallorca” in Viage literario, 21:113; cited in Pablo Piferrer and José Marí�a Quadrado, Islas Baleares (Barcelona, 1888), 722–23.

26  Leopoldo Torres Balbás, “Plazas, zocos, y tiendas de las ciudades hispanomusulmanas,” alAndalus 13 (1947): 437–76; cited by Margalida Bernat, “De Madina a urbs gótica: Ciutat de Mallorca, 1230–1300,” in La Ciutat de Mallorca i els segles del gòtic, ed. Tina Sabater and Eduardo Carrero Santamarí�a (Palma, 2010), 115–48 at 131. 27  Bernat, “De Madina a urbs gótica,” 131.

28  Lorenzo Pérez, “Misión apostólica de San Vicente Ferrer en Mallorca,” Studia 328–329–330 (1957): 133–158, esp. 141. 29  “Darrere la capella de Sancta Anna en la carrera ha on fer la canal de la capella.” From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 51v.

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up on the exterior wall of the chapel, close to the drainpipe on the roof and overlooking the street. The construction of the third chapel on the Gospel side is today dated to the 1370s, although the altar received endowments from at least 1287.30 If, as seems likely, the chapel had been constructed by the time this anniversary was written, then there must have been another street, running parallel to the north aisle of the church, and which extended at least as far as the Chapel of St. Anne. Perhaps the Pedró street passed between the bell tower and the cathedral itself, continuing straight through space that would later be filled Figure 14.4: Roman network of roads (figure by the author with lateral chapels. This based on a map by Guillem Rosselló Bordoy, with permission). street does not appear to be listed in the Llibre de Repartiment, which is why it has traditionally been thought that other Islamic structures lay to the north of the mosque.31 But we might also consider that this disappeared section of the Pedró street falls precisely in the location proposed by Rosselló Bordoy for the southern “decumanae” of the Roman city, of which only a small portion remains along Carrer de Sant Bernat. This street would connect to the southernmost point of the “Kardo Maximo,” still conserved today in Carrer de Sant Roc, remains of which have been found in excavations around the Baroque cloister of the cathedral (Figure 14.4).32 30  Testament of Guillem de Sant Just, 1287. I thank Francisco Molina for this reference.

31  Pons and Riera, “Excavacions arqueològiques,” 55.

32  The network of Roman streets has been proposed by Guillem Rosselló Bordoy, “Palma romana: nuevos enfoques a su problemática,” in Pollentia y la romanización de las Baleares (Alcudia, 1983), 143–55.

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Figure 14.5: Former chapel of St. Catherine, with the entrance to the bell tower in the background, 1404. Palma, Catedral de Mallorca (© Catedral de Mallorca, Palma).

Within this proposed network of urban spaces, the survival of a section of Roman road until it was destroyed as the cathedral expanded seems entirely possible. We cannot, however, discount the possibility that Islamic buildings adjacent to the mosque were located here, as Riera y Pons has proposed. So, the street mentioned in the Consueta may have been part of some perimeter built during construction around the cathedral precinct. This may be why the street is not named by the Llibre de Repartiment, the Consueta Antigua, or by any of the other sources consulted. Let us return to the problem of a possible street between the cathedral and the body of the bell tower: we know of no examples of a completely free-standing cathedral bell tower, separated from the body of the church, among other cathedrals in the Crown of Aragon. If this is the case here, the construction of the bell tower must have begun after the plan of the cathedral—central nave flanked on each side by a single aisle—had already been established. This becomes problematic when we see that the only documentary references associated with the bell tower are found in the first Llibre de fábrica i sagristia de la Seu, between 1327 and 1345, and the entries, moreover, refer only to repairs inside the bell tower and prior to this alleged change in plan for the cathedral.33

33  Villanueva was the first to realize the nature of the primer llibre de la fábrica: “Viaje a Mallorca” in Viage literario, 21:103; Sastre Moll, El primer llibre de fàbrica, 62.

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The idea that there was a pre-existing structure that would explain the deviation of the bell tower from the rest of the cathedral has been amply demonstrated. The idea was first proposed in the nineteenth century by Pablo Piferrer and José Marí�a Quadrado, at the same time that they asserted the bell tower was separate from the rest of the cathedral building until the construction of lateral chapels on the Gospel side.34 A few years ago, when a lift was being installed, analysis of the bell tower’s walls was undertaken. While the results were not definitive, it was shown that the bell tower’s walls were built on top of a pre-existing structure. We know from elsewhere that it was common practice to superimpose a bell tower on the site of the minarets of mosques, which were themselves in the area around the sahn of the mosque. This argues against the bell tower once being a minaret, given the existence of a street between the supposed minaret and the rest of the mosque. It appears the cathedral was joined to the bell tower when the vaults of the Chapel of St. Catherine, in front of the current Sacristy of the Vermells, were completed (Figure 14.5).35 My conclusion is that the bell tower’s curious orientation can be explained by the fact that it was adapted to a pre-existing street pattern, reflecting the corner of two Roman roads (Carrer del Deganat and the Pedró street).36 I will abstain on whether or not the bell tower was constructed on top of the old minaret, as this issue has yet to be resolved.

The Altar of St. Catherine and the Chapel of St. Barbara

Studies of the cathedral have traditionally located the fourteenth-century cloister as beginning at the fifth vault, separated by a thin barrier referred to in documentary sources as a temporary wall. This theory was not contradicted when the construction of the fourth chapel dedicated to St. Catherine—the chapel that connected the cathedral to the bell tower—was dated to 1404. The foundation stone of this chapel was laid in August of that year,37 and the keystone put in place in October 1405.38 However, thanks to the 1399 inventory and the Consueta Antiga, we know the altar of St. Catherine was already in place by the end of the fourteenth century, located inside the body of the 34  Piferrer, Quadrado, Islas Baleares, 723–24.

35  Sastre Moll, La Seu de Mallorca, 243.

36  In this way Mateu Riera Rullan, “Els nivells d’època antiga de l’excavació arqueológica de 1999 a la Catedral de Mallorca,” in L’Antiguitat clàssica i la seva pervivència a les illes Balears. XXIII Jornades d’Estudis Històrics Locals, ed. Marí�a Luisa Sánchez and Maria Barceló (Palma, 2005), 317.

37  “Item, on August 30, I received three florins from the honourable Monsignor Francesc Descals, given for the construction for the love of God, as he laid the first foundation stone of the chapel in front of the tower bell” (Item rabí� a XXX de gost del honrat mossèn Francesch Descals tres florins los quals dona a l’Obra per amor Déu per tal com posà la primera pedra als fonaments de la capela denant lo cluquer). Cited from Sastre Moll, La Seu de Mallorca, 459.

38  “Item, I paid the masters eight shillings that was dispensed on the day that the keystone to the vault of the bell tower was raised, as is customary.” (Item doní� als mestres vuyt sous que despenguesen lo jorn que pujaren la clau de la capela del cloquer, axí� con és acustumat). Cited from Sastre Moll, La Seu de Mallorca, 480.

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Figure 14.6: Hypothetical reconstruction of the cathedral precinct and location of altars, ca. 1370 (drawn by the author).

church and in front of the bell tower. Therefore, this future fourth section of the church already existed, although it was not yet vaulted.39 Following the various anniversaries of the Consueta, there is a possible location for the altar of St. Catherine consistent with the organization of altars established in the inventory of 1399, the street behind it, and its location opposite the bell tower within the church. Pending the construction of the side chapel, the provisional perimeter of the cathedral was the Gospel side of the building itself, before the expansion of the space

39  “[…] The absolution would be done in front of the bell tower, the third part of the wall behind St. Catherine” (fas la absolució denant lo cloquer, ters ab la paret darrera Sancta Caterina). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 99v.

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by means of the construction of a sequence of lateral chapels. This perimeter coincides with the side of the now-lost Pedró street, its width defined by the space between the aisle of the church and the area next to the bell tower. Concerning the altar and chapel dedicated to St. Barbara, the inventory of 1399 cites it as alongside but distinct from the Chapel of St. Catherine. An anniversary in the Consueta refers to one of the three doors leading into the cloister as the door of St. Barbara, so we must assume this was the entrance at the foot of the church on the Gospel side.40 This is similar to the door on the Epistle side, that of St. Bernard. I therefore propose that the Chapel of St. Barbara, like that of St. Bernard, is also found in the wall that separates the church from the cloister of the cathedral, this time facing inside the church. This hypothesis is reinforced by an anniversary in a tomb at the outer corner of the main choir, right in front of the Chapel of St. Barbara.41 The location of this chapel is not surprising, as it recalls the wall at the foot of the Old Cathedral of Lleida (Figure 14.6).

The Cathedral Cloister

The cathedral cloister has played a marginal role in research into the cathedral. Father Antoni Matheu Mulet is the sole author to dedicate a mono­graph to the history of its chapels.42 The cloister presents numerous chrono­logical problems, from its initial construction to its ultimate destruction. Curiously, it is just this problem that can help us to understand the nature of the site. In thirteenth-century documentation of the cathedral of Mallorca, the word claustro was used interchangeably with the term “ciminterio” to denote the same place, since it was used exclusively for the burial of the cathedral clergy.43 However, with the endowment of All Saints’ Chapel in 1273, built by Bishop Pere de Morella, the cemetery was opened gradually to families able to pay for the privilege of being buried alongside the clergy.44

40  “And is buried into the cloister, at the entrance of Saint Barbara, in such arms” (E iau en la claustra al portal de Sancta Barbara en aytal señal), Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 119.

41  “[…] And is buried into the church, outside of the corner of the choir, to the left of the main door, in front of Saint Barbara” (E iau en l’esgleya al cantó del cor de fora. Axí� com hom entra per la porta maior del cor a mà sinestra denant Sancta Bàrbara). Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 148. “[…] And is buried into the church, near of the top of the choir, in front of Saint Barbara” (E iau dins l’asgleya prop lo cap del cor denant Sancta Bàrbara). Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 174. 42  Pedro Antonio Matheu, Retablos y capillas. Capillas claustrales (Palma, 1956).

43  “[…] They have also ordered and wanted that the deceased bodies to be buried in the cloister or cemetery of this cathedral would be provided to the chapel, and there, in front of the altar, antiphon Subvenite sancti must be sung, with an absolution made by the hebdomadary” (Item ordinaverunt et voluerunt quod corpus defuncti quod sepeli debeat in claustro vel cimiterio dictae sedis apportetur ad dictam capellam et ibi ante altare cantata antiphona Subvenite sancti etc. ab hebdomadario absolvatur). Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, Pergaminos 13478, Notary: Petrus Arnaldi, 1273. Published in Mateo Nebot, “El segundo obispo de Mallorca. Don Pedro de Muredine (1266–1282),” Bolletí de la Societat Arqueológica Lul·liana (BSAL) 13 (1910): 183–188, esp. 187. 44  About the foundation of the All Saints Chapel, Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, VA. 2723, fol.

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Both the bishop’s original endowment and references to it in the fourteenth-century Consueta Antiga locate All Saints’ Chapel in the cloister. José Marí�a Quadrado’s hypothesis that the first part of the bell tower, now known as the sagristia dels Vermells, was located inside this chapel does not seem feasible.45 Another issue is its subsequent transfer to the bell tower when building activity in the aisles required it.46 The presence of this structure in the cloister across these two centuries connects the canons’ cemetery from the thirteenth century to the fourteenth-century cloister—sufficient evidence that this cemetery site did not change its location from the time of its foundation, remaining on the western side of the cathedral until it was eliminated entirely. A consistent feature in the transformation of mosques into cathedrals was for the sahn of the aljama to be converted into a cemetery, as we also see in Tortosa, Huesca, Zaragoza, Cordoba, and Seville, among others.47 We should distinguish between this thirteenth-century cemetery inside the courtyard, and the old Muslim cemetery located opposite the Almudaina Castle, which was donated by King James I to the leader of Tarragona together with some houses on the site of the future Dominican friary.48 The use of the space as a cemetery continued, for it became the cathedral’s cemetery. Located outside the building, it was reached through a door located at the foot of the cloister. Having clarified its possible origins, let us consider the architecture of the cloister. Durliat published what I believe is the first reference to the cloister in the fourteenth century, when in 1329 the old chapels found inside the Christianized mosque were moved to this area in temporary wooden structures. The eastern wall of the mosque was removed for the construction of the new apse that was completed or nearing completion. These chapels were moved in order to connect the structure of the old mosque and 96. Cited in Francisco Molina, “Llegats testamentaris a l’obra de la Seu (1350–1355),” in La Ciutat de Mallorca i els segles del gòtic, ed. Tina Sabater and Eduardo Carrero Santamarí�a (Palma, 2010), 206.

45  Piferrer, Quadrado, Islas Baleares, 722. Salvador Galmes i Sanxo thought the All Saints’ Chapel was located at the base of the bell tower, supposedly constructed prior to that year. Salvador Galmes “El campanar de la Seu,” in Salvador Galmes i Sanxo. Narrativa 2. Relats breus i proses literàries (Barcelona, 1994), 219.

46  Another account of the graveyard and the location of the chapel is as follows: “[…] That the priest who owns this benefice, should perpetually celebrate the divine offices for all the deceased faithful, and especially for the souls of the bishops and canons of this Holy Church, in the chapel that the bishop had built in the cemetery of this cathedral, under the invocation of All Saints (the one that was in the place where now is the chapel of the Most Pure Virgin)” (Que el sacerdote poseedor de dicho beneficio debe celebrar perpetuamente los divinos oficios por todos los fieles difuntos y especialmente por las almas de los obispos y canónigos de esta Santa Iglesia en la capilla que hizo construir dicho obispo en el cementerio de esta catedral bajo la invocación de Todos los Santos [el que se hallaba en donde ahora está la capilla de la Purí�sima]). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, Cuadernos y papeles sueltos 40, 15884, n. 2. Published in Molina, “Llegats testamentaris,” 209 (document 24).

47  Eduardo Carrero Santamarí�a, “Entre almuédanos y campanas. Constantes sobre la conversión de aljamas en catedrales,” Hortus Artium Medi­evalium 17 (2011): 185–200, esp. 189.

48  Gabriel Llabrés, “Reparto de Mallorca en 1230. La porción del Prepósito de Tarragona,” Bolletí de la Societat Arqueológica Lul·liana 19 (1922): 366.

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the apse.49 A few years later, entries referring to the well in the cloister appear in the first Llibre de fábrica i Sagristia, published in full by Jaume Sastre. By 1333, this well had been filled in and had to be recovered for it to be used.50 The first construction work in the cloister is usually dated to 1345.51 The area was covered with wooden beams to protect people entering the cathedral through the cemetery gate, opposite the Almudaina Castle. According to records of expenses, this covered area was not extensive—no larger than one of the four walkways around the cloister, which are already identified in the De Tempore customary, dated around the 1360s. They also appear in later construction records from the time of Bishop Lluí�s de Prades (r. 1407–1429). In 1393, a wooden beam from a ship was adapted for use as a pillar for part of the cloister. Villanueva reminds us that some of the cathedral chapter meetings when they were not held in the sacristy were held in the cloister, at least until the construction of the Gothic chapter house, which first appears in writing around 1421. The Consueta also tells us that the All Saints’ Chapel was located near the eastern section of the cloister.52 Since it had two entries, there would have been a door onto the eastern corner of the cloister.53 Its facade and main entrance might have been oriented towards the two doors of St. Bernard and St. Barbara, which provided access from the cloister to the church. I would propose that the main entrance to the cloister was of a sufficient size to be independent of the retaining wall.54 To the west of the chapel was the nearby door of the fossar major, in front of the royal castle. Inside, there was, among other things, a tomb exclusively for priests.55 Another feature of the cloister, one we know little about, is the schola cantorum. Gabriel Llompart has published a reference to a rent payment from 1349 for part of a house belonging to the painter Loert, to be used as a school to avoid the stench from burials during the Black Death. We know from the Consueta that this must have 49  Durliat, L’Art dans le Royaume, 135.

50  Sastre Moll, Primer llibre de fàbrica, 74.

51  Sastre Moll, Primer llibre de fàbrica, 133.

52  “[…] is buried in the first cloister in the tomb of Iohan Rotlan, next to the pillar where it turns towards the All Saints Chapel, close to a grave with the arms of a wing and another grave with the arms of a dove” (Iau en lo primer claustro en lo vas den Iohan Rotlan de costa lo pilar con hom gira a la capella de Tots Sants prop un vas hon senyal de ala. E hun altre hon ha senyal de colom). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 76.

53  “[…] and is buried in front of the minor entrance of All Saints in the corner of the cloister, into the Pere Ses Mates cloister grave” (E iau denent lo portal menor de Tots Sancts al cantó del claustro e iau en lo vas d’en Pere Ses Mates en la claustra). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 13. 54  “[…] and is buried in front of All Saints and the two doors of the cloister that leave from the church” (E iau denant Tots Sants denant les dues portes de la claustra qui hix de l’asglaia). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 38v. 55  “[…] is buried in the same cemetery where the buried priests are, in a tomb attached to the All Saints Chapel” (Iau al fosar ha on iauhen los preveres en un carner quis té ab la capella de Tots Sancts). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 139.

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been near the All Saints’ Chapel, probably in front of it in the northern section of the cloister.56 Other anniversaries from the Consueta that refer to burials provide information about all four walkways in the cloister, an orchard or garden with all kinds of fruit trees, a well, a reservoir connected to the Font de la vila, a porch with piers, some fonts enclosed by railings, and archways, which are mentioned only once in the entire Consueta, but which could be anything (arcosolia from the perimeter, chapels made of wood between the pillars, or some more advanced construction). In the search for the purposes for the cloister, Father Antoni Matheu Mulet published a reference from 1524, when the cathedral chapter commissioned the canon Gregory Genovard to write a sermon that would stimulate the charity of the faithful, so they would contribute to the conservation of the cloister.57 Considering that the entire area had already been covered, together with the idea in the thirteenth century of “cloister” being synonymous with “cemetery,” leads one to rethink the meaning of the term in Mallorcan documents, in which the term can refer to an inner courtyard. It is true that the area had structures and functions typical of a cathedral cloister, like an orchard, a cemetery, chapels between the pillars on the walls, arcosolia, and a space for processions throughout the liturgical year. But the documentation found so far does not indicate the presence of a typical stone vaulted cloister structure. Rather, we seem to be dealing with a space that had at least a wooden porch in some portion, a patio or garth located behind the retrochoir that continued to function as a processional and burial space even when the majority of the cathedral was built.

Lost Structures and Images from the Consueta Antiga

The Consueta Antiga is also a source of information about minor structures and even images of which nothing survives. We learn of a viewing area where the quarrymen’s house was located, while the workmen’s house was located next to the bell tower. In the cloister, there were images of St. Christopher, while an image of Mary of Nazareth was located near the porta del Mar.

Conclusions

Our so-called Consueta Antiga was a practical document listing the anniversary masses required to be celebrated day-by-day through the year. In a developing built environment and with an increasing number of tombs in the cathedral, it formed a useful administrative document to commemorate the memories of those buried in the cathedral in Palma de Mallorca. By detailing the place of burial and the altar where funeral rites were celebrated, it offers us fresh information and new insights into the architecture and lit56  “[…] and is buried in the cloister, near the choir school, into de P. Garau grave which is in front of the All Saints door” (E iau a la claustra prop l’escola del cant al vas den Garau P. denant la porta de Tots Sancts). From Palma, Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca, CC. 3403, Consueta Antiga, fol. 152. 57  Matheu, Capillas, 4–5.

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urgy of the cathedral. It is also an invaluable source for the medi­eval heraldry of the city, thanks to the reproduction of signs (senyals) carved or painted on the walls. The use of such obituaries in the cathedral of Mallorca helps us better understand its architectural history because otherwise it is difficult to see its evolution, having coexisted with the ancient structure of the Alhama mosque for more than a century. Conversion of mosques into Christian places of worship used similar architectural procedures across the Iberian peninsula, although this varied according to different peculiarities of the Islamic religious buildings, their date of construction, the different possible orientations of the qibla, the number of naves, the location of the sahn, or even the siting of its minaret. Drawing on the numerous documents from the cathedral archive, I have here argued that the cloister area was converted in the thirteenth century from a cemetery that was likely the burial space in the former mosque. This cloister fulfilled many of the functions of a medi­eval cathedral cloister, but was not built in stone. The term “cloister” itself implies the presence of a patio with a garden behind the retrochoir of the central nave, used both for burials and for housing the All Saints’ Chapel. This chapel, while difficult to locate precisely, had a certain importance that survived its subsequent transfer. Altars, which existed before the actual construction of the side chapels, like St. Catherine’s on the northern (Gospel) side, were probably placed along the aisle until the side chapels were built. On the other hand, the chapels of St. Bernard and St. Barbara were located, according to my hypothesis, on the wall that separated the church from the cloister. Concerning the topo­graphy of the northern side of the cathedral, in the late fourteenth century we have seen that there still existed a stretch of road between the Gospel-side chapels and the buildings of the surrounding city streets, thereby explaining the curious orientation of the bell tower. The whole area was eventually filled with the auxiliary buildings of the cathedral chapter, such as the Gothic chapter house. We can take the argument one step further, thanks to the memory of an anniversary. The fact that the different orientation of the bell tower in relation to the rest of the cathedral was due to the pre-existing urban streetplan, could discard a different qibla orientation other than the axis of the current cathedral of Mallorca, which conserves the canonical Islamic orientation towards the sun’s ortho during the winter solstice. The prayer halls towards the west connected to the sahn, while the north wall of the mosque coincides with the aisle on the Gospel side of the church, separated by what was likely a Roman road that later became known as Pedró Street. Perhaps scholars will in future revisit the question of why the plan for the cathedral shifted in the first half of the fourteenth century from a single-naved plan to one with a nave flanked by an aisle on either side, but for now, no one dares to do so. The cloister as a cemetery and the places of worship seen topo­graphically through the burials gave a new perspective of a cathedral as this one in Mallorca. The Consueta Antiga is a source that shows in practice how commemoration became permanent for those longing for eternal life under the protection of the cathedral.

Chapter 15

MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN CATALAN-ARAGONESE SARDINIA FROM 1323 TO THE PRESENT ESTHER MARTÍ

The presence of the Crown of Aragon in Sardinia has left a cultural legacy in the

memory and identity of Sardinian culture which is still very visible today. This chapter explores this impact across seven centuries. Identity is shaped by contrasts and disagreements, and it tends to emerge where different groups face each other, often in some context of competitiveness.1 This occurred in Sardinia, from the arrival of the Catalan-Aragonese in 1323 and through their influence across the island for the next five centuries. Catalan-Aragonese heritage and its historical memory in Sardinia lasted into the contemporary period. Institutionally such heritage includes the exact or almost exact continued use of fiscal and political institutions and offices, such as the viceroy, governors, parliament, and royal chancery. The Catalan-Aragonese governmental structure lasted until 1847, when the so-called Savoyard administrative system was introduced as a result of the fusione or “Perfect Fusion” between the mainland states of Savoy–Piedmont and the hereto distinct Sardinia, long after the House of Savoy took control of the island in 1720.2 This half-millennium allows an in-depth study of Catalan cultural influence in Sardinia from the Middle Ages to today, through a comparative analysis of elements of identity existing in the Catalan territories that are similarly found in Sardinia. The CatalanAragonese presence in Sardinia and its memory today are considered here mainly from a historical and institutional point of view—although the influences on the arts, lan-

*  This chapter was written with the support of La Regione Autonoma della Sardegna through a research grant jointly financed with PO FSE 2007–2013 and LR7/2007 funding under the rubric “Promoción de la investigación cientí�fica y la innovación tecnológica en Cerdeña,” to develop a project entitled “L’Impronta catalana nella cultura sarda dal Medioevo all’attualità: Storia, Istituzioni, Arte, Lingua, Tradizioni popolari e Antropo­logia.” The original text was translated by Núria Mina Riera. 1  Ugo Fabietti, L’identità etnica. Storia e critica di un concetto equivoco (Rome, 1995), 118.

2  Antonello Mattone, “L’eredità catalano-aragonese,” in Storia dei sardi e della Sardegna. L’Età moderna. Dagli Aragonesi alla fine del periodo Spagnolo, ed. Bruno Anatra, Antonello Mattone, and Raimondo Turtas, 4 vols. (Milan, 1989), 3:217. Lluí�s J. Guia, “Pervivencia y ruptura de la tradición juridico-polí�tica de la Corona de Aragón en las ciudades reales del Reino de Cerdeña (siglos xv– xviii),” in Ricordando Alberto Boscolo. Bilanci e prospettive storiografiche, ed. Maria G. Meloni, Anna M. Oliva, and Olivetta Schena (Rome, 2016), 390–406. Esther Martí ([email protected]) is Ricercatore in Medi­eval History at the Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea–Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Cagliari, Italy.

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guage, and traditions are also briefly analyzed. Specifically, we focus on issues of identity among the urban oligarchies in the major Sardinian royal towns and cities, together with offices they held and their family relationships with and as clients of the monarchy and other social elites; parliaments prove to be an invaluable framework for examples. The characteristics of these urban oligarchies and their willingness to create a Catalan identity in Sardinia are examined in the years immediately following the CatalanAragonese conquest. We show how the identity they forged then continues to be felt today, in many respects, its influence seen in Sardinian institutions and culture.

Catalan Influence on Sardinian Identity, Memory, and Cultural Heritage

National identity is a collective feeling based on the sense of belonging to the same nation, and of sharing numerous characteristics that make it different from other nations.3 In fact, by analyzing difference and its history, as Jacques Derrida stated, we can presume to know who we are and where we are.4 So, identity is often built on difference, in a dialectical relationship with the gap between us and the other, and between the ever-changing borders of a country.5 Such a concept must be understood, in Augé’s words, not as closed but rather as a changing passage that can always be reconstructed.6 On the other hand, identity cannot exist without collective memory, since identity is a symbolic construct that must merge with memory to survive.7 Memory, a type of social selection of remembrance, is the foundation of identity, or rather, of the diversity of identities.8 The fact is that within an identity, multiple identities can exist, as can be observed in Sardinia today. In the process of forming identity, historical memory always plays the same role. Namely, it offers a representation that imbues with meaning our own present time. In Fabietti and Matera’s words: “Memory is the faculty by which human beings establish a connection between the past and the present, a basic ingredient of identity.”9 In reality, the collective memory of the Sardinian people, as developed over a long period, has led to Catalan-Aragonese cultural influences from different angles. 3  Montserrat Guibernau, “Què és la identitat nacional?,” in Les identitats a la Catalunya con­tempo­ rània, ed. Jordi Casassas (Cabrera de Mar, 2009), 47–82 at 42. 4  Jacques Derrida, La différance (Paris, 1968).

5  Michele Parodi, “I fantasmi dell’antropo­logia,” Orbis Tertius 1 (2010): 119–38 at 119. 6  Marc Augé, Pour une antropo­logie de la mobilité (Milan, 2010), 11–18.

7  Ugo Fabietti and Vincenzo Matera, Memorie e identità. Simboli e strategie del ricordo (Rome, 2000), 9.

8  Albert Balcells, “Els llocs de memoria?,” in Les identitats a la Catalunya contemporània, ed. Jordi Casassas (Cabrera de Mar, 2009), 83–84.

9  “La memoria è la facoltà grazie alla quale gli esseri umani stabiliscono una connessione fra il passato e il presente, un ingrediente basilare dell’identità.” Cited from Fabietti and Matera, Memorie e identità, 13–15.

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Catalan Influence on Sardinian Institutions

Let us consider aspects of identity in the Sardinian institutional system drawn from a Catalan-Aragonese origin. We will focus on those institutions introduced to the island with the arrival of the Crown of Aragon, particularly the parliamentary system and the management of the Sardinian royal cities. Studying the identity of the elites in local government is crucial. Most of them were of Catalan and Valencian origin, a fact that will in most cases last throughout the period of Spanish dominion. Through them we can see the interrelationship of the elites with the royal administration, explore their resources and economic activities, and build a realistic profile of this oligarchy. We will also need to examine the feudal system established after the Catalan-Aragonese conquest. We will consider the prosopo­graphical study of the aristocratic families of Catalan origin and their degree of integration with the other elites on the island throughout the five centuries studied here. Moreover, we’ll emphasize the study of the local elite’s contacts with the military and with Catalan nobility. In this way we will uncover the possible web of family and clientelist relationships among the three social estates and the other kingdoms belonging to the Crown. Let us first consider Catalan influences on the administration of Sardinia. After the Catalan conquest the crown wanted to organize the kingdom, taking into account the fact that Sardinia was undergoing a process of important change, both social and institutional, marked by the introduction of systems of urban government of Pisan and Genoese origin to the traditional management of territories of Arborea, thereby creating a non-homogeneous mosaic of laws and dispositions. The Catalan-Aragonese royal administration took advantage of this institutional weakness, and the absence of any strong native power to resist, imposing, across the conquered territory, a territoriallybased administrative system based on the municipality, the feudal structures, and the royal administration. The latter was the representation of the monarch in the island, so this function had to control the other two.10 Control of the Kingdom of Sardinia by the Catalan-Aragonese sovereigns, outside the royal cities and the feudal system, was centred on a network of royal officers who, inspired by Catalan officers, covered the island. Royal administration, as Olla Repetto suggests, was based on the principle of royal representation by officials highly esteemed by the sovereign. Mirroring the situation in Catalonia, a complex system of officers, hierarchical in structure and without much room for manoeuvre, was created in Sardinia. At the apex of the administration was the Governor General, a figure existing from the times of Infante Alfonso as an expression of the highest judicial, political, and military power. This was a new post in Sardinia conceived by the future King Alfonso the Benign 10  Gabriella Olla Repetto, “L’amministrazione regia,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 47–50. Esther Martí�, “La identidad catalana en Cerdeña,” in Sardegna Catalana, ed. Anna Maria Oliva and Olivetta Schena (Barcelona, 2014), 232–35. Gian Giacomo Ortu, “Il sistema delle città regie nella Sardegna aragonese,” in Identità e frontiere. Politica, economia e società nel Mediterraneo (secc. xiv–-xviii), ed. Lluis J. Guia, M. Grazia Mele, and Gianfranco Tore (Milan, 2015), 106–112.

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of Aragon to carry out royal functions in his absence. The position of Governor General was in many ways similar to that of procurador, familiar to other kingdoms belonging to the Crown. Below the Governor General were other officials with judicial and political powers, such as the vicar (veguer) of Cagliari, the captain of Iglesias, or the podestà of Sassari, figures who transmitted royal power into and across the territory. With respect to military power, we find castle lieutenants (castellans) located at strategic points. Beyond them we also find, as in the Princedom of Catalonia, a robust web of minor officers, such as “salt makers, customs oficials, chamberlains, mapmakers” (saliners, ­doganers, c­ amarlenchs, portolans), to name but a few, who were in charge of controlling the economic and commercial systems on behalf of the Crown in Sardinia. New offices were introduced by the Trastamara, to control royal assets after years affected by the deep economic and demo­graphic crisis before and after the plague of 1348, which wreaked havoc across the Crown’s territories. King Ferdinand I of Aragon introduced the position of royal procurador, the king’s most trusted man on the island, to be in charge of the royal estate’s officers and to manage feudal lands. He had his own jurisdiction and under him the island was able to return to the primitive unified administration, leaving a second in command in Cap de Logudor. In due course, he was controlled by the “head curator” (conservador mayor), a post introduced in 1415. Administrative consolidation continued with Alfonso the Magnanimous. He created the figure of viceroy who became the real powerholder in Sardinia. He was endowed with all jurisdictions and all inhabitants, without exception, were subject to him, both in the royal cities and in feudal lands. The governors of the two Caps (Logudoro and Cagliari) were maintained, but the Governor of Cagliari and the Viceroy were the same person, endowing him automatically with more prevalence over the other governor. After this initial flurry, no major changes are documented in the Sardinian administrative system, other than the formal establishment in 1480 of the royal auditor or mestre racional, and not even after the final incorporation of Sardinia into the Crown, under John II in the Parliaments of Fraga and Lleida of 1460. The system created by Alfonso the Benign and enriched by the Trastamara lasted with little change during the Spanish dominion of the island, even during the Savoyard period, since they were forced to respect the system under the 1718 Treaty of London. Only after 1847, with the merging of Sardinia and the Piedmont, did Italian administrative practice arrive on the island to affect an administrative system that had prevailed for more than five centuries.11 Turning now to representative assemblies or parliaments, we can observe that the parliamentary tradition in Sardinia closely followed that of the Catalan Corts, though they were less influential and had some distinct, insular characteristics.12 Internal functioning of the Sardinian parliaments was based on a structure similar to those celebrated in the Crown of Aragon, which followed almost the same ceremonial development.13 11  Olla, “L’amministrazione regia.”

12  Francesco Manconi, “‘De no poderse desmembrar de la Corona de Aragón’: Sardegna e i Paesi catalani, un vincolo lungo quattro secoli,” Archivio sardo. Rivista di studi storici e sociali 1 (1999): 25–47 at 45–46. 13  Mattone, “L’eredità catalano-aragonese,” 223. Anna Maria Oliva, “I Parlamenti nel regno

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This affected the relationship between the Sardinian royal cities and the sovereign, and was not well-documented during the early fifteenth century, particularly in comparison to information for other dominions of the Crown. Conversely, despite the clear Catalan-Aragonese legal influence on Sardinian parliaments, some nuances can be observed which render them unique. For instance, there was no regularity in the meeting of parliaments, especially during the fourteenth century, and to a considerable extent until the end of the fifteenth century. During this period, the king held very few parliaments in comparison with those held in Catalonia. This was partly due to the difficult situation the kingdom faced, caused by its constant peacekeeping efforts. The most salient reason was, however, the immaturity of the Sardinian parliamentarian system and its elites. In fact, as the fifteenth century progressed, the monarch and his delegates had great difficulty enforcing their will, because every branch or estate (the ecclesiastical or clerical; the military or noble; and the royal or urban) and the ensemble of the three estates developed mechanisms to protect their own interests, just as their Catalan and Valencian counterparts had done. It was not until the Sardinian parliament of 1481–1485 that an improvement was perceived in the maturity of relationships between the king and the three estates, which would often determine a higher degree of conflict in the assemblies. This was due to increased strength and cohesion among the Sardinian oligarchies, who would often strongly disagree with the monarch to preserve their own interests as a group, much like the situation in the Royal Estate in the Catalan Parliament (Corts).14 Tensions between the three estates and the sovereign can be attributed to—besides the experience acquired in the more-than-a-century-long parliamentary practice, and the economic growth of the Sardinian royal cities—to the increasing authority of the monarchy. We see this tendency in the parliaments, the management of the royal cities, and relationships with the oligarchies in municipalities. As regards the urban oligarchies and the representative assemblies, it is important to point out that they started to form—from the beginning of their arrival to the island following the Catalan-Aragonese conquest—a wide network of contacts, family and clientelist relationships, akin to what happened in the peninsular kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon. This network would gradually become evident with the passage of the centuries, and they would keep close family and cultural ties with Catalonia. Prosopo­graphical studies are especially useful here, as they provide a panoramic view of the oligarchies that controlled the urban government and their relationships with the other social strata. But I will concentrate now on municipal documentation where the sources permit. The representative or síndic was a crucial functionary in cities and towns, as he connected the municipality with the Royal Estate and the monarchy. In fact, the municipal representatives of both the Sardinian and the Catalan assemblies followed the same career paths. That is to say, they all belonged to an elite group of citizens who controlled di Sardegna,” in Sardegna Catalana, ed. Anna Maria Oliva and Olivetta Schena (Barcelona, 2014), 137–62.

14  Bruno Anatra, “Contrappunti sui Parlamenti sardi,” Archivio Sardo del Movimento Operaio Contadino e autonomistico 47, no. 4 (1996): 137–41.

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local government. They usually had many years of experience in institutional affairs; they may have been part of the citizens’ board or different internal city boards, or they might have held important positions in the local administration, even the royal one. In return, the representative would be used by the monarch for his own advantage, to gain the affection of the city, and gain support of the city’s representative in the parliaments. This led to a powerful clientelist network that linked the urban oligarchies, the other estates, and the royal household. Conversely, it was common, especially in the Catalan case, but also in Sardinia, to find a representative who was both an expert in law and a prominent oligarch, allowing him to be a faithful representative of the leading group’s interests in the assemblies; the leading families were represented and the legal advice was the best possible. It is worth noting that in Sardinia we find a higher amount of procuradors from the commercial sector than in Catalan cities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the period receiving the most scholarly attention.15 In Sardinia the presence of jurists was also very common, an example of which can be seen by the representatives of Cagliari, Sassari, and Alghero in the Parliament of 1421.16 Municipal sources acknowledge a network of contacts formed among the different cities of the kingdom of Sardinia, with the aim of being informed and of helping each other and thus being able to formulate more elaborate requests to the sovereign (albeit less frequently than in Catalonia), once the parliamentary sitting was over. In the Sardinian case, the municipal Catalan system was considered a model, with Barcelona the prime example. It must be borne in mind that in Sardinia it is very difficult to paint a clear picture of contacts within the Royal Estate between the municipal procuradors and the citizens’ board, at least regarding the Parliaments of 1355 and 1420. This is due to the lack of extant sources and the short duration of the assemblies. It is known, however, that in the Parliament of 1421, Cagliari and Iglesias jointly submitted their demands of respect of their privileges.17 In Sardinia, just as in the Princedom of Catalonia, constant contact existed between the royal cities and the monarchy, based on a generally good relationship. A salient example is the fact that Cagliari acted as an intermediary in the meeting of 1446 between the sovereign and the Military Estate.18

15  Esther Martí�, Lleida a les corts. Els síndics municipals a l’època de Alfons el Magnànim (Lleida, 2006), 105–6; Esther Martí�, “Parlamento, re e municipio: un’analisi comparativa delle relazioni di potere nel Regno di Sardegna e nel Principato di Catalogna nel xv secolo,” in Atti della 59 Conference of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (Alghero, 9–12 luglio 2008), ed. Francesco Soddu (Sassari, 2010), 429–30.

16  Alberto Boscolo, Acta Curiarum Regnum Sardiniae. I parlamenti di Alfonso il Magnanimo, 21 vols. (Cagliari, 1993), 2:117; Anna Maria Oliva and Olivetta Schena, “Potere regio ed autonomie cittadine nei parlamenti sardi del xv secolo,” in Autonomía municipal en el mundo mediterráneo. Historia y perspectivas, ed. Remedios Ferrero (Valencia, 2002), 155. 17  Boscolo, Acta Curiarum Regnum Sardiniae, 2:87.

18  Antonio Marongiu, “Il Parlamento o Corti del vecchio Regno sardo,” in Acta Curiarum Regnum Sardiniae. Istituzioni rappresentative nella Sardegna Medioevale e Moderna. Atti del Seminario di Studi (Cagliari, 1986), 15–123 at 42–43.

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Cagliari, the capital city of the kingdom, like Barcelona, took the major role in the assemblies of the parliaments and key contacts with the monarchy. In addition, Cagliari knew best how to preserve Catalan institutional memory. Cagliari had a higher number of síndics sent to the parliaments and held a privileged position in the Royal Estate and in the parliamentary negotiations. Nonetheless, other cities had an important economic and political role. Such cities, as in Catalonia, seized every opportunity to increase their power. This led to a growing rivalry among the royal cities, which produced a degree of weakness that the sovereign took full advantage of to diminish the cohesion of the Royal Estate and thereby better impose his will.19 On the other hand, the Sardinian oligarchies would never break the institutional bond with Catalonia. In fact, beyond the working procedures of the assemblies, which corresponded to the Catalan model, as mentioned above, contacts with the motherland, and especially with Barcelona, remained frequent. For instance, in 1446 the juries or jurats of Cagliari wrote to those of Barcelona to request their intervention to attain a modification, for their city and for Alghero, in the excessive rate of terç, a tax imposed on coral fishing in Tunis.20 Such relationships among the different kingdoms indicate that, outside parliament, contacts through the embassies between the cities and the monarchy always existed. For Sardinia, this was the only way to manage problems that surfaced in the cities or the land, due to infrequent meetings of the representative assemblies.21 Returning to the topic of the urban oligarchies, it was common in Sardinia, as in Catalonia, for one single family to have different members, either at the same time or successively, in parliament or in the upper echelons of municipal government, extending the family’s power and influence over time. Occasionally, we even see members of the same family in important representative positions in parliament for different cities -- for example, the merchant Aymerich family, from Cagliari, but of Catalan origin. Among its members we find illustrious councillors of the city of Cagliari, who also obtained numerous offices in the royal administration. Martí� Aymerich, for instance, was consul of Sicily in 1454, a position inherited in 1492 by Pere Aymerich, another member of the family.22 Nicolau Aymerich was another significant member of this same family. He was chief councillor (conseller major) and representative of Cagliari in the Parliament of 1497, and in the following one, in 1500, as procurador of Castelsardo and Iglesias, and then in the Parliament of 1504–1511 as síndic of Cagliari.23 In 1594 another member of the same family appears within the Military Estate, namely Melcior Aymerich.24 In the same family 19  Martí�, “Parlamento, re e municipio,” 423–32.

20  Pasquale Tola, Codice Diplomatico della Sardegna (Sassari, 1985), 68.

21  Piero Sanna, “I Parlamenti del Regnum Sardiniae: problemi storico-istituzionali,” Archivio Sardo del Movimento Operaio Contadino e autonomistico 47/49 (1996): 29–49 at 35. 22  Francesco Floris, Feudi e feudatari in Sardegna, 2 vols. (Cagliari, 1996), 2:539–41.

23  Anna Maria Oliva and Olivetta Schena, Acta Curiarum Regni Sardiniae. 5. I Parlamenti dei Vicerré Giovanni Dusay e Ferdinando Girón de Rebolledo (1495, 1497, 1500, 1504–1511) (Cagliari, 1998), 100, 219, 233, and 402. 24  Diego Quaglioni, Acta Curiarum Regni Sardiniae. 12. Il Parlamento del Viceré Gastone de Moncada, marchese di Aytona (1592–1594) (Cagliari, 1997), 97.

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we count several prestigious clerical figures, such as Bartolomé, canon of the archdiocese of Cagliari. He was present in the group of religious figures who appointed the síndic to represent them in the Parliament of 1593.25 In short, the Aymerichs offer an image of a well-positioned family nucleus in the city, present in almost all the decision-making spheres of society, who were able to establish a complex network of relationships and power.26 Various families in Cagliari held a number of procurador-ships in the parliaments or had several members in the different estates, either simultaneously or after brief intervals. Some examples are the Salsets, Des Banchs, the Bothers, the Roigs—a merchant family of Iberian origin, the first to reinhabit the Castle of Cagliari (Castel de Càller) after the Catalan conquest—or the Torellós,27 or many síndics of Sassari, such as Serafino of Montanyana or Antonio of Marongiu, procurador of this city in the Parliament of 1421. He belonged to a rich family of merchants from Logudor, who exerted a strong influence on the Sassari of the fifteenth century.28 In addition, the purchase of a noble title was one of the familial strategies for attaining a higher position within urban government, and within the kingdom. In Catalonia, in the same period, nobility was achieved by means of an advantageous marriage into an aristocratic family, or by directly purchasing the title. In Sardinia, a large number of citizens were rewarded for their help to the monarchy during the conquest of the island and were granted one or more feods. Such families would thus have the chance to belong to the Military Estate and to participate in representative assemblies, as well as adding a major degree of influence and power to the family clan. The urban oligarchies also established networks with the Clerical Estate. Sardinia was very similar to other areas of Catalan influence. For example, Gerardo of Serra, one of the síndics of Goceano and Juan of Serra, síndic of Chiaramonti, in the Parliament of 1421, very likely belonged to the same family as Mateo Serra, bishop of Terralba, a member of the Clerical Estate in the same parliament.29 Similar trajectories can be found with the De Milia, Pilares, and Aragall families as well. We can observe here that the oligarchies of the major Sardinian royal cities presented a similar profile to those in other kingdoms of the Crown, namely the Catalan and Valencian cities, on which the Sardinian ones modelled themselves. Moreover, the strong 25  Quaglioni, Acta Curiarum Regni Sardiniae, p. 165.

26  Anna Maria Oliva, “Il Consiglio Regio nel regno di Sardegna: prime ricerche,” in La Corona cata­ lanoaragonesa i el seu entorn mediterrani a la baixa edat mitjana, ed. Maria Teresa Ferrer, Josefina Mutgé, and Manuel Sánchez (Barcelona, 2005), 220.

27  For the presence in the parliaments of the oligarchies of Catalan origin in Sardinia see Esther Martí�, “I procuratori municipali nelle assemblee rappresentative della Corona d’Aragona nel XV secolo: il caso sardo,” in Sardegna e Mediterraneo tra medioevo ed età moderna. Studi in onore di Francesco Cesare Casula, ed. Maria Giuseppina Meloni and Olivetta Schena (Genoa, 2009), 195–205. 28  Anna Maria Oliva, Olivetta Schena, “Autonomie cittadine e potere regio negli atti dei Parla­menti del Regno di Sardegna nel Quattrocento,” Archivio sardo 2 (2001): 77.

29  Dionigi Scano, Codice diplomatico delle relazioni fra la Santa Sede e la Sardegna, 2 vols. (Cagliari, 1941), 2:13 (document 16); 23–24 (document 33); and 25 (document 35).

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Catalan influence on the Sardinian elites lasted for centuries. In this way, the almost exclusive presence, in certain spheres, of relatives of Catalan and Valencian descent among senior officials of the island during the late Middle Ages, became a tradition that would last, without major changes, until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Finally, a few families achieved, within two generations, representation in the different estates or assemblies or in all of them contemporarily. There were even families who, like the Sunyers, managed to attain important positions within the local governments of royal cities in Catalonia, Mallorca, and Sardinia, thus creating a trans-Mediterranean network of contacts and power.30 Let us turn now to the role of feudalism in these families of Catalan-Aragonese descent, not only through the establishment of estates and feods, but also by exploring the relationships among the aristocratic families, particularly with the Catalan aristocracy and the Crown of Aragon. The feudal system introduced in Sardinia by the Crown of Aragon was a new imposition on the island, creating a wide feudal network that excluded only the major cities that remained under royal ownership. As Tangheroni has argued, this had major consequences for the political, institutional, social, and economic world of fourteenth-century Sardinia. Besides, and above all, it set the foundations of a system with staying power, as it survived dynastic changes largely intact for five centuries. The wish to create a strong feudal system on the island was not only due to the Crown’s need for money, and to control the territory after the Catalan conquest, but it reflected the existing royal project for political and economic organization of the new kingdom with its strong commercial and economic aspects. It was for this reason that the sovereign wanted all the kingdoms of the Crown to join the conquest of Sardinia. All social groups were involved, but the nobility were prominent, the only class in society that could offer the king constant military aid and then provide, through feods, effective control of their allocated land. In documents from the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, we can see the major role played by the Catalan nobility in the military occupation of the island in 1323: 332 armed men on horseback and fifty-eight knights, followed by the Valencian force with 191 men on horseback and fifty-eight knights, and the Aragonese, who supplied 495 horsemen.31 30  Anna Maria Oliva, “‘Rahó es que la Magestat vostra sapia.’ La Memoria del sindico di ‘Cáller’ Andrea Sunyer al sovrano,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 105 (2003): 335–85 at 336–41; Josep Estelrich, “La famí�lia Sunyer, una nissaga de mercaders de la Baixa Edat Mitjana (1375–1505),” Bolletí de la Societat Arqueològica Lul·liana 51 (1995): 3–30 at 3–5; Santiago Sobrequés, “Régimen municipal gerundense en la baja edad media. La ‘insaculación’,” Anales del Instituto de Estudios Gerundenses 10 (1955): 165–207; Josefa Maria Arnall, Lletres reials a la ciutat de Girona (1293–1515), 2 vols. (Barcelona, 2000), 2:773–74 and 915–16; Francisco J. Morales, Ciudadanos y burgueses honrados habilitados como síndicos del brazo real en las Cortes del Principado de Cataluña. Dinastías de Trastámara y de Austria. Siglos xv y xvi (1410–1599) (Madrid, 1995), 294. 31  Marco Tangheroni, “Il feudalesimo,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 41.

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The granting of feods was done mainly to reward the new feudal lords for the military and economic support they provided the monarchy. These aristocrats were Catalan and Valencian—with few exceptions, such as the Carroz—although there were also Aragonese lords, and to a lesser extent, local families. Other beneficiaries were descendants of senior royal officials, close to the monarchy. Others belonged to the urban oligarchies, especially from Barcelona, who funded the conquest. Let me highlight some examples of aristocratic families of Iberian origin who left an imprint on the identity and collective memory of Sardinians. The Carroz family is a case in point.32 It was a Valencian family of a certain significance who played a major role in the conquest of Sardinia and became one of the most important feudal families, together with the Sanjusts, the Centelles—also of Valencian origin—33 the Aragalls, the Aymerichs, the Bellits, the Boyls, the Paus, the Roigs, the Fois, the Cardonas,34 the Sanjusts,35 and others. With the unification of the Crown of Aragon and that of Castile, Sardinia officially entered the Spanish sphere. However, this union produced few changes to the Sardinian feudal system or to the families that controlled it, despite the progressive opening of the system and the granting of new feods to non-Iberian appointees. Tangheroni concluded that these feudal structures survived centuries: Regarding the rest, the feudal structures were also intended to last longer, beyond the dynastic change which Sardinia brought [...] under Savoia sovereignity. Sardinia reached the Restoration with its feudal structures, which were still present and rooted.36

Well into the seventeenth century, under Austrian rule, the family ties of the Sardinian feudal oligarchies with links to the former Crown of Aragon were still visible despite dilution over time. Even at the apex of society we find families like the Castellví� retaining political influence.37 32  Tangheroni, “Il feudalesimo,” 44.

33  Francesco Floris and Sergio Serra, Storia della nobiltà in Sardegna: genealogia e araldica delle famiglie nobili sarde (Cagliari, 2007), 216.

34  The Cardonas were an important Catalan feudal family, present in Sardinia from the fourteenth century, with significant weight in Sardinian society. They held major positions in the local governments of the island on different occasions, while they retained properties both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Sicily. Floris, Feudi e feudatari in Sardegna, 2:388–90; Floris, Storia della nobiltà in Sardegna, 207–8.

35  The Sanjusts are one of the oldest families in Cagliari of Catalan descent. They arrived on the island with Infante Alfonso’s expedition. They are one of the few families whose descendants exist today, having kept links with Spain for centuries. Floris, Feudi e feudatari in Sardegna, 2:409–16.

36  Del resto, le strutture feudali erano destinate a durare anche ben oltre, al di là del cambiamento dinastico che portò la Sardegna [...] sotto la sovranità dei Savoia [...]. La Sardegna giunse così all’età della Restaurazione con le sue strutture feudali ancora ben presenti e radicate. Cited from Tangheroni,, “Il feudalesimo,” 46.

37  Joan Arrieta Alberdi, “Giuristi e consiglieri sardi al servizio della Monarchia degli Asburgo,” in Il Regno di Sardegna in età moderna. Saggi diversi, ed. Francesco Manconi (Cagliari, 2010), 41–98 at 65–70. Esther Martí�, “Corona de Aragon e identidad en la Cerdena bajomedi­eval,” in Identità e frontiere, 26–27.

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Catalan Influence on Art

The Catalans in Sardinia exerted various influences on art produced on the island and remain one of the most obvious Iberian influences on the historical memory of this land. This was particularly true of Sardinian architecture, as the sanctuary of Bonaria in Cagliari clearly demonstrates. However, this place of worship already shows differences between Sardinian Gothic and Catalan, if we consider the Aragonese chapel in Cagliari Cathedral.38 Still in Cagliari, the churches of Sant’Eulalia 39 and San Giacomo were constructed by Catalan architects. The latter used to have a cloister which is now lost. The same is true for many elements of the original buildings. Elements of the Catalan Gothic style can be observed in the neighbourhood of Castello: the magnificent ancient church and cloister of San Domingo,40 the canons’ residence of the cathedral, the nearby chapel of Esperanza, the lost monastery of San Francesco, the late Gothic traces of the churches of Santa Lucia, La Purissima, and Santa Maria dei Monti, and the church of the San Sepolcro in Marina. Nearby we find good examples in the churches of San Pietro in Asemini and San Giorgio in Sestu. Catalan Late Gothic influence can also be observed in San Francesco and Sant’Agostino of Sassari, St. Domingo of Oristano, and in many other both civil and ecclesiastical buildings in Alghero. The church of San Francesco,41 however, stands out among a myriad of religious monuments spread all over the island.42 Catalan-Aragonese master builders also exerted a strong influence on non-religious buildings, particularly urban defences and castles erected across the island. Examples include the fortifications of Santo Michele in Cagliari, Sanluri, Vilasor, and Laconi, built or rebuilt thanks to the granting of feods to families of Iberian origin, or the enlargement of the royal palace of Cagliari, from 1418 onwards. Iberian building techniques spread even more widely due to the organization of the work on building sites made up of artisans and labourers of both nationalities. Such building sites became places where the Sardinians could copy or be inspired by the new techniques of the conquerors.43 38  Renata Serra, “L’architettura sardo-catalana,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 125.

39  Maria Freddi, “La chiesa di Sant’Eulalia a Cagliari,” in Atti del XIII congresso di Storia dell’Architettura. Cagliari, 6–12 aprile 1963, 2 vols. (Rome, 1966), 1:245–51. 40  Renata Serra, “Contributi all’architettura gotica catalana: il San Domenico di Cagliari,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi per la Storia dell’Architettura 17 (1961): 120–27.

41  Aldo Sari, “Contributo all’architettura tardo gotica in Sardegna: la chiesa di San Francesco di Alghero,” in Studi in onore di Giovanni Lilliu per il suo settantesimo compleanno (Cagliari, 1985), 127–52.

42  Serra, “L’architettura sardo-catalana,” 125–54; Aldo Sari, “L’architettura del Cinquecento,” in La società sarda in età spagnola, ed. Francesco Manconi, 2 vols. (Quart, 1992), 1:74–89; see also the comprehensive work of Antioco Piseddu, ed., Chiese e Arte Sacra in Sardegna (Cagliari, 1998–2009) and Aldo Pillittu, “La civiltà artistica catalana in Sardegna,” in Sardegna Catalana, ed. Anna Maria Oliva and Olivetta Schena (Barcelona, 2014), 297–346. 43  Francesca Segni Pulvirenti, “Arte catalana in Sardegna,” L’Umana avventura 15 (1990): 88.

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The influences of the Late Catalan Gothic style became more evident from the late fifteenth century and throughout the following century. This was due to the growth of Sardinian cities between the 1520s and 1550s, when the precariousness of the Late Middle Ages resolved. The sector of society that benefitted the most from this growth was the urban oligarchy. Although still nascent, it comprised Catalan and Valencian traders and merchants who, despite being long settled on the island, still maintained close ties with the motherland. Such links were represented by an aristocracy who, in spite of gaining new lands, as we have seen, this did not limit their mercantile activities, and together with royal or governmental functions they kept their family referents in the Iberian territories. This was reinforced by the Sardinian lifestyle, especially that of people who lived in coastal cities, in two ways, Firstly, the number of luxury items ordered from the Iberian Peninsula and Naples increased. Secondly, we see an increase in the number of qualified personnel and of valuable artistic goods arriving in the island’s cities. At the same time, the urban fabric began to undergo some changes, as the aesthetic strictures of the Late Gothic style were slowly supplanted by newer preferences.44 Let us now turn to painting, sculpture, and other crafts. Indeed, we can say that the strong cultural and techno­logical imprint of the Catalan influence on Sardinian art affected, to a large extent, all forms of art. The history of the pictorial altarpiece in Sardinia is a prime example of the impact of Catalan culture.45 Catalan art particularly influenced painting, obvious within a short period after the Catalan occupation of Cagliari. Already in 1355, Pere Blanc, a Catalan painter living in the city, moved to Alghero, where King Peter the Ceremonious granted him a house as part of the politics of repopulation of this recently conquered city. Artworks from the Catalan sphere were also starting to be imported, mainly from Barcelona. Similarly, some works were commissioned by Catalan painters who were active in Sardinia. The Art Gallery of Cagliari preserves a high number of altarpieces.46 Most of them belonged to the lost Franciscan friary in Cagliari. These altarpieces were made by key figures of the international Gothic style, such as Joan Mates, Joan Figuera, Rafael Tomàs, and Joan Barceló.47 Catalan Gothic painting gained momentum and generated Sardinian exponents, mainly artists trained in Catalonia, or working alongside Catalan artists, with the Master of Castelsardo its major representative.48 He and his disciples represented a turning point towards Sardinian artistic “independence,” generating genuine forms of expression while, at the same time, fostering the evolution of Gothic forms towards Renais44  Francesco Manconi, “Il Regno di Sardegna in età moderna: l’impronta catalana,” in Il Regno di Sardegna in età moderna. Saggi diversi, ed. Francesco Manconi (Cagliari, 2010), 14–15. 45  Renata Serra, Retabli pittorici in Sardegna nel Quattrocento e nel Cinquecento (Rome, 1980), 5–6. 46  Pinacoteca Nazionale di Cagliari, Catalogo, 2 vols. (Cagliari, 1988).

47  Joan Ainaud de Lasarte, “La pittura sardo-catalana,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 111–19; Carlo Aru, La pittura sarda del Rinasci­mento: i documenti di archivio (Cagliari, 1926). 48  Carlo Aru, Il Maestro di Castelsardo (Bo­logna, 1928).

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sance styles. The Renaiisance style became highly important with the Cavaro family playing a major role. In fact, they were the best representatives of the School of Stampace, giving them a central position in the history of Sardinian art. It is remarkable, however, that they still kept strong ties to the Iberian Peninsula, as can be observed from the fact that Pere, the highest representative of this family of painters, trained in Barcelona and Naples.49 Sculpture at this time completely centred on the altarpiece (or at least what has survived, either physically or in some written source). The almost exclusive presence of Iberian imports confirms the new ruling classes’ preference, with the Catalan altarpiece being the star product in a pictorial and sculptural panorama of fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Sardinia. It is almost as if they wanted to recreate environments familiar from the motherland left behind. Such a conclusion is suggested by the numerous preserved altarpieces, especially around Cagliari, and particularly from an initial view, where it is difficult to find differences between Catalan, Aragonese, or Valencian altarpieces of the same period. Few artworks or sculptural compositions survive that are not part of the pictorial and sculptural system of the altarpiece. A few examples include the statue of a group mourning the death of Christ in the church of St. Giacomo in Cagliari, and a number of crucifixes, among which the crucifix of St. Francis in Oristano stands out.50 Iberian influence is clear through many items of Sardinian craftsmanship: pottery, fabrics, embroidery, leatherwork, jewellery, and cork elaboration, among others, contain Iberian traits, which have often resulted in improvements in technique and form.51 Catalan Influence on the Sardinian Language

Although few studies have analyzed the presence of Catalan in the Sardinian language, the large influence of the former on the latter is posited as fact. In fact, Wagner went so far as to assert in his studies on Sardinian that, after Latin, the Catalan-Spanish element was the most influential of all that affected the structure of the Sardinian language.52 Nonetheless, the influence of Catalan on Sardinian culture goes much beyond language. The Catalan language permeated all social strata, becoming the language of civil and ecclesiastical administration. The fact that it was spoken by many sectors of society, particularly in royal cities, eased its entrance into the Sardinian language. Many Catalan 49  Joan Ainaud, “La pittura sardo-catalana,” 121–23; Carlo Aru, La pittura sarda del Rinascimento, 191–93; see too for this period: Giovanni Zanzu and Gabrielle Tola, eds., Pittura del Cinquecento a Cagliari e provincia (Genoa, 1992); Renata Serra, Pittura e scultura dall’età romanica alla fine del ‘500 (Nuoro, 1990), 171–233. 50  Serra, Retabli pittorici in Sardegna, 10–14.

51  Fernando Pilia, “Influsi della cultura catalana sulle tradizioni popolari sarde,” Quaderni Bolotanesi 17 (1991): 484–85.

52  Max Leopold Wagner, “Los elementos español y catalán en los dialectos sardos,” Revista de Filo­logía Española 9 (1922): 221–65; Max Leopold Wagner, Dizionario etimo­logico sardo, 3 vols. (Heidelberg, 1960–1964), 3:383–404; Giulio Paulis, “Le parole catalane dei dialetti sardi,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 155–63 at 155.

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loanwords are still in use in Sardinian today. However, Catalan’s influence was felt far less in the north of the island than in the south, with Cagliari the major starting point of Catalan loanwords.53 Castilian began to be introduced in Sardinia, as in the other Catalan territories of the Crown, with the arrival of the Habsburgs. But, unlike with the introduction of Catalan, Castilian penetrated due to royal dispositions, not by massive settlement, as was the case with Catalan, at least in the areas of Campidano and in Alghero. The religious world, the bishops and, in particular, the Inquisition, were the most important catalysts for the spread of Castilian. Notwithstanding, Catalan continued to be frequently used in the church, at least during the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Despite the impact of Catalan and Castilian, the majority of the islanders continued to express themselves in Sardinian, especially those who lived far from major urban centres. Although the introduction of Castilian sped up during the second half of the seventeenth century, there was resistance to such a linguistic change. In spite of this, Catalan was more and more substituted by Spanish during the eighteenth century, which, in turn, was substituted by Italian in the following century. For example, in 1868 Pillito wrote to Milà i Fontanals that the Catalan language in Sardinia was only known in Alghero (L’Alguer in Catalan) where everyone had always spoken it.54 Many words influenced by Catalan and later on by Castilian have been identified by Paulis, following Wagner’s research, such as ulleres, baldufa, and bressol (glasses, spinning top, and dradle). These words are widespread, with variations in the south of Sardinia, especially around Campidano. Besides these, many Catalan and Castilian loanwords can be found in the dialects of the southern part of the island.55 Catalan was the language of public administration and legislation. For instance, the proceedings of the parliaments, from the first meeting held on the island in 1355 to the last parliament in 1698–1699, were in Catalan. Privileges and other royal dispositions were also written in Catalan, such as the Llibre Verd, the Ordinacions of the city of Cagliari,56 and the privileges of Alghero.57 Likewise, announcements (pregons) and other official documents were written in Catalan, even under the Habsburgs. Catalan was also the language of the feudal system on the island until very late. In 1738, for instance, in the Savoyard period, graces, concessions, and legal chapters (gràcies, concessions, capítols) granted by the marquis of Quirra and his vassals were in Catalan. Catalan also strongly penetrated the Sardinian religious world, as its use was common in church administration, virtually until the second half of the seventeenth cen53  Giulio Paulis, “Le parole catalane,” 155–56.

54  Jordi Carbonell, “La lingua e la letteratura medi­evale e moderna,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 93–96. 55  Giulio Paulis, “Le parole catalane,” 157–63; Wagner, Dizionario etimo­logico sardo, 3:383–404.

56  Raffaele di Tucci, Il libro verde della città di Cagliari (Cagliari, 1925); Michele Pinna, Le ordinazioni dei Consiglieri del Castello di Cagliari del secolo XIV (Cagliari, 1927); Francesco Manconi, ed., Libro delle ordinanze dei Consellers della città di Cagliari (1346–1603) (Sassari, 2005).

57  Francesco Manconi, ed., I libri dei privilegi della città di Alghero. Libre Vell (Cagliari, 1997); Francesco Manconi, ed., I libri dei privilegi della città di Alghero. Libre Gran (Cagliari, 1999).

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tury. Records of baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and deaths were written in Catalan. Account books and church inventories also appeared in Catalan both in Sardinian cities and in many inland villages. Even beatification and sanctification texts were written in Catalan.58 Castilian also entered the Sardinian religious world, as we see in a 1631 manu­ script of Carmona, where popular religious hymns (goigs) in Catalan were replaced by goigs in Spanish. In subsequent manu­scripts goigs in Spanish were combined with ones written in Sardinian.59 We find widespread use of Catalan in notarized documents until the eighteenth century. Likewise, Catalan was the language of Sardinian guild regulations, and it even occupied a prominent place in private correspondence. As Carbonell suggests, Catalan became commonly used by almost all social strata, so that, in modern times, royal instructions in Spanish had to be translated into Catalan to be spread in the form of pregons. Even Spanish jargon used by the administration contained the same Catalan loanwords we find in the other Catalan-speaking kingdoms.60 Many streets in Cagliari kept their Catalan names even at the height of Spanish dominion. Some streets continued to be called their Catalan names, even when the name changed, an interesting fact for the historical memory of the city’s inhabitants. For instance, “carrer dels Mercaders” was renamed “carrer Mayor” in the sixteenth century; the street “dels Mariners” became “dels Cavallers”; the many attempts to rename the ancient Leofantis Street, which became “carrer de Santa Creu”; and the “Plassa Major” and leathermongers’ “carrer dels Pellicers” became “carrer Sa Seu” in the sixteenth century.61 In spite of this, Spanish became common in Sardinia, and Catalan was progressively lost, except in Alghero. A similar evolution took place at the same time in Catalonia, Valencia, and Mallorca. However, a significant difference was that in the latter three most of the population continued to speak Catalan while, in Sardinia, the vast majority of the population could only then speak Sardinian.62 Both the influence of Catalan on Sardinian poetry and on Algherese throughout history deserve separate attention. This is not possible in the present study due to constraints of space. For information on such topics, the works of Toda, Caria, and the recent work of Armangué may prove useful. I may also return to this topic in forthcoming publications.63 58  Carbonell, “La lingua e la letteratura medi­evale e moderna,” 94.

59  August Bover, “I goig sardi,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 106. 60  Carbonell, “La lingua e la letteratura medi­evale e moderna,” 94–95.

61  Dionigio Scano, Forma Kalaris (Cagliari, 1934–1942), 39–40.

62  Miquel Batllori, “La cultura sardo-catalana nel Rinascimento,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 99–101.

63  Eduard Toda, L’Alguer: un popolo catalano d’Italia (Sassari, 1981); Rafael Caria, “L’alguerès des d’una perspectiva històrica,” Revista de l’Alguer 1 (1990): 33–53; Bartomeu Simon and Joan Armangué, Llengua i cultura a l’Alguer durant el segle xviii (Barcelona, 1996).

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The Influence of Catalan in Traditions and Popular Culture Numerous religious traditions in Sardinia contain elements of Catalan influence—and subsequently Spanish—including, for instance, the cults of certain saints, sanctuaries, brotherhoods, processions, and pilgrimages. The effect of Catalan-Aragonese traditions in popular religion and devotion followed the introduction in Sardinia of the cults of saints such as St. Eulalia, patroness of Barcelona, together with other popular Catalan saints. For example, saints Alexi, Aloi, and Jordi (George),64 saints Bardilis, Brai, Bartumeu, Salvador d’Horta, and the Mercedarian saint, Ramon Nonato. This Catalan saint, still worshipped today in the church of Bonaria, was called on especially during childbirth, because of his unusual arrival into the world.65 Francis IV of Austria–Este, in his description of Sardinia, wrote that pregnant women measured the saint with a band, and before labour they tied the band to their waists, a tradition that even the queen followed.66 The Marian cult of the Virgins of Esperanza, Pilar, Valverde, Buen Camino, Merced,67 Bonaria,68 and of Montserrat, the patroness of Catalonia, were also introduced bit by bit. In fact, most of them became part of the local toponymy and onomastics, a fact which highlights the influence of Iberian saints in the memory of Sardinians. The cult of the Virgin of Montserrat was widespread throughout the island with the arrival of the Catalans.69 A chapel from the lost house of San Francesco de Stampace in Cagliari was known by such name.70 The cult of the Virgin also caused a change of name in the church of Santa Maria de Paulis, in Campidano, renamed Beata Virgine de 64  It is often difficult to differentiate between St. George, knight and patron saint of the CatalanAragonese lands, and St. George, the bishop, whose veneration was widespread throughout the island. However, the devotion to St. George, the knight, is obvious in the songs compiled by Spano in 1863. Raimondo Turtas and Giancarlo Zichi, eds., Gosos. Poesia religiosa popolare della Sardegna centro-settentrionale (Cagliari, 2004), 203–4. 65  Joaquí�n Millán, San Ramón nonato, al servicio de los cautivos (Barcelona, 2003), 3–5.

66  Francesco Alziator, “Echi di tradizioni popolari nelle Descrizione della Sardegna di Francesco IV d’Austria-Este,” in Studi in onore di Francesco Loddo Canepa, 2 vols. (Florence, 1959), 2:8–10.

67  The cult of Merced quickly spread across Sardinia. The Mercedarian Order took up residence in the monastery of Bonaria in Cagliari in 1336, as the first stable Catalan nucleus on the island. In addition, the first-known songs of the island are devoted to the Virgin of Merced. Bover, “I goig sardi,” 106.

68  Maria Giuseppina Meloni, Il Santuario della Madonna di Bonaria. Origini e diffusione di un culto (Rome, 2011), 19–34; Maria Giuseppina Meloni, “Ordini religiosi e santuari mariani. I Mercedari e il culto per nostra Signora di Bonaria a Cagliari tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento,” in Culti, santuari, pellegrinaggi in Sardegna e nella Penisola Iberica tra Medioevo ed Età Contemporanea, ed. Maria Giuseppina Meloni and Olivetta Schena (Genoa, 2006), 339–69. Maria Giuseppina Meloni, “Culto dei santi e devozione mariana nella Sardegna catalana: Il santuario di Bonaria a Cagliari tra fede e identità,” in Sardegna Catalana, ed. Anna Maria Oliva and Olivetta Schena (Barcelona, 2014), 216–223. 69  Serafino Agus, Arte e religione a Montserrato (Dolianova, 1996), 18.

70  Giovanni Spano, Guida della città e dintorni di Cagliari (Cagliari, 1861), 184–85; Renata Serra, Pittura e scultura dall’età romanica, 231.

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Montserrat. The cult of the Virgin of Montserrat was such that the village of Pauli was renamed after the Virgin, and became Montserrato in 1888.71 The cult of Our Lady of Montserrat in this Campidanese village was and still is very strong, as shown by the popular religious traditions and the treasury of the Virgin, one of the richest in Sardinia.72 Brotherhoods and guilds also played a major role in the reach of such saints. Following the Catalan tradition, each brotherhood and guild had a patron saint and a chapel in a church where they could follow religious services and bury their deceased members. Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries there were at least ten brotherhoods and guilds in Cagliari alone, some of which have survived until the present day.73 With the incorporation of the new cults, a tradition started of adding hymns to religious services, namely the aforementioned goigs (gòccius or gòggius in Sardinian). This tradition spread quickly throughout the island. Around Campidano and, especially, in Nuorese—although in this case it may refer to non-religious songs as well—it was common to name such religious hymns gròbbes, from the Iberian word cobla. These popular texts, which extol and praise the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the saints, were mainly used to ask for protection, either on behalf of people and animals, or to obtain a good harvest. They were often sung in processions, pilgrimages, or on the feastday of the patron saint of the given place. The majority of these religious compositions still keep their original structure, which has sa torràda, the refrain, a term clearly drawn from the Catalan tornada.74 El Cant de la Sibil·la is also of Catalan origin. Also known as Lo senyal del Judici, it was sung on Christmas Eve in Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, Roussillon, and Sardinia. Although it probably reached many parts of the island, it has only survived to the present day in Alghero.75 Aguiló in Cançoner popular de Catalunya mentioned a Christmas carol in Alghero from the late eighteenth century (“Cançò de Nadal feta a Alguer, Sardenya, a final segle XVIII”).76 He also commented on camarillas,77 or caramelles in Catalan, a song young people sing on the eve of Easter in Catalonia and on Christmas Eve in Ibiza. In this same publication, Aguiló also mentions the existence of ploradores in Sardinia, similar to those in Mallorca.78 71  Luisa Degioannis, “Il culto dei santi,” in Retabli. Sardinia: Sacred Art of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cagliari, 1993), 174; Agus, Arte e religione a Montserrato, 18–19 and 48–49.

72  Agus, Arte e religione a Montserrato, 19. Luciano Gallinari and Esther Martí�, “The Medi­eval Heritage: Islands and Territories with a Specific Identity?,” in The Crown of Aragon. A Singular Mediterranean Empire, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Leiden, 2017), 484–509 at 499–500. 73  Joaquí�n Arce, España en Cerdeña. Aportación cultural y testimonios de su influjo (Madrid, 1960), 308.

74  Raimondo Turtas, “Alle origini della poesia religiosa popolare cantata in Sardegna,” in Gosos. Poesia religiosa popolare della Sardegna centro-settentrionale, ed. Raimondo Turtas and Giancarlo Zichi (Cagliari, 2004), 11–22 at 11–12. 75  Carbonell, “La lingua e la letteratura medi­evale e moderna,” 97.

76  Josep Massot, Obra del Cançoner Popular de Catalunya. Materials, 4 vols. (Barcelona, 1993), 4:248. 77  Josep Massot, Semblances i comentaris (Barcelona, 1999), 282–83.

78  Massot, Semblances i comentaris, 283. Gallinari and Martí�, “The Medi­eval Heritage,” 500–502.

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Iberian influence is present in the great number of words preserved in religious manifestations or spiritually charged processions, as Arce has shown. He highlights, for example, the Holy Week procession in Cagliari of “The Mysteries,” very Iberian and still celebrated today. In addition, the capital city of Sardinia has also maintained the Procession of the Meeting, s’incontru, common in many Catalan and Valencian towns.79 Certain texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also retain an Iberian flavour. These include fervent, popular representations of Christ’s Passion in Spanish and Sardinian, very similar to the traditional representations of Christ’s Passion still celebrated today every Holy Week in numerous places in Catalonia.80 Let us now turn to other popular traditions that are not religious. We should remind ourselves that dress is an important element in the collective notion of identity, as it is considered, after language, one of the most meaningful and symbolic ways of expressing the identity of individuals, a group, or a community.81 Folk dresses, and especially festive costumes currently worn for certain festivities, portray a marked symbolic and national nature, and today are often a marker of communal self-awareness and a means of preserving historical memory. This definition matches the Sardinian traditional garment perfectly well.82 And we can observe substantial Catalan influence in the Sardinian style of dress. Francesco Manconi noted the impact of the textile and clothing trade from Catalonia and its influence on the way of dressing in Sardinia.83 Both Cagliari and Alghero dressed in the Catalan fashion, as did many other towns, a process of “contamination” of the way of dressing imposed by the Iberian textile industry. Consequently, two of the basic components of Sardinian peasant dress became the very common berritta (for which the ethno­grapher Violant i Simorra studied its similarities to the Catalan, Sicilian, and Neapolitan barretina) and fabrics using burell, a rough, black fabric, which was extremely hard-wearing.84 Besides, it is worth noting that during the centuries of Catalan-Aragonese dominion, the exchanges between the island—especially the harbours of Cagliari and Alghero—and the Eastern Iberian coasts—Barcelona and subsequently Valencia—would increase. As a result, economic and social relationships between the two peoples grew. This was enhanced by repopulation of the island, with people coming from the Catalan territories, as happened in Alghero and Cagliari.85 79  Massot, Semblances i comentaris, 280.

80  Francesco Alziator, ed., Testi di drammatica religiosa della Sardegna (Cagliari, 1975), 23–24.

81  Mario Atzori, Tradizioni popolari della Sardegna. Identità e beni culturali (Sassari, 1997), 121.

82  Susanna Paulis, La costruzione dell’identità. Per un’analisi antropo­logica della narrativa in Sardegna fra ‘800 e ‘900 (Sassari, 2006), 233–36.

83  Francesco Manconi, “L’eredità culturale,” in I catalani in Sardegna, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi (Milan, 1988), 219.

84  Paolo Piquereddu, “Note di storia dell’abbigliamento in Sardegna,” in Costumi, Storia, Linguaggio e Prospettive del Vestire in Sardegna, ed. Anna Pau (Nuoro, 2003), 15–60 at 25.

85  Manconi, “Il Regno di Sardegna in età moderna,” 13. Esther Martí�, “Oligarchies, urban govern­ ment and royal cities in late-medi­eval Sardinia: elements for the construction of an identity,” in Sardinia from the Middle Ages to Contemporaneity, ed. Luciano Gallinari (Bern, 2018), 60–61.

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Still, as the sixteenth century advanced, Catalan influence on the Sardinian way of dress was notable. The traditional Mediterranean ports in the Iberian Peninsula remained the main suppliers of textiles, thus dictating the fashion of urban Sardinia and, and to a lesser extent, the rural and mountainous areas. This can be observed in the tailors’ guild regulations of 1532, preserved in the Archivio Comunale di Sassari, which lists a number of male and female costumes of the period. There is also a detailed painting in which traces of Catalan influence on fashion can be observed: big hats ornamented with rivet (ribbon) and women dressed in “skirts” (faldettes) or “mourning clothes” (dol). The middle classes contented themselves with the same designs but theirs were made of less expensive fabrics: contray, stamet, fustagno, or saya. (velvet, thread, fustian or sagum).86 Francesco Alziator and later Antonio Tavera were the first to reconstruct the development of Sardinian jewellery over time,87 whilst an ethno­graphic, archaeo­logical study has examined the evolutionary strati­graphy of Sardinian jewellery being crafted today. The results show an ancient basis, even then ornamented with Hebraic and Byzantine traits, then a strong Catalan and later Hispanic layer; these constitute the key to all the popular pieces of jewellery in Sardinia.88 As with traditional dress, a large number of words from Catalan, and subsequently from Spanish, can be seen in the descriptions of feminine and masculine pieces of jewellery. For example, Algherese ladies used golden apretaderos de cap (hairpins); whereas those in Cagliari dressed with a diadema and vetas that formed necklaces, bracelets, and dress ornaments. Gold and silver botons (buttons) with an ornamental function can be found in many late inventories. The neck was often ornamented with canotilles (necklace decorations) and gold botonets. Another obviously Iberian piece of jewellery seen on the island was lasu. It consisted of a necklace with a butterfly shape, made with a perforation technique, usually ornamented with pearls. It was worn tied to the neck with a velvet band.89 Padrenostres (Lord’s Prayer necklaces) and cadenas (chains) with padrenostres, sintes (ribbons), or stanca sanch (a superstitious decorative pendant), and clauxadors (decorative pendants) were also widespread.90 From the early-modern period we find the Nom de Jesús, a devotional ornament whose arrival in Sardinia is related to the Jesuits, can be found in inventories in Algheri and Cagliari. The pom, a sphere-shaped jewel to carry perfume, was worn by many Algherese and Sassarese ladies in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, 86  Piquereddu, “Note di storia dell’abbigliamento in Sardegna,” 25; Maria Teresa Ponti, “Statuto sassarese del sec. xvi relativo al gremio dei calzolai: documenti inediti,” Bollettino Bibliografico Sardo 12 (1956): 2–8. 87  Antonio Tavera, “La gioielleria: ornamento, magia, devozione,” in Il museo etnografico di Nuoro, ed. Paolo Piquereddu (Sassari, 1987), 131–82; Antonio Tavera, “L’oreficeria popolare,” in La cultura popolare, l’economia, l’autonomia (Cagliari, 1994), 171–74. 88  Mario Atzori, Tradizioni popolari della Sardegna. Identità e beni culturali (Sassari, 1997), 328.

89  Atzori, Tradizioni popolari della Sardegna, 205.

90  Marisa Porcu Gaias, “La diffusione del gioiello nella Sardegna medioevale e moderna. I cor­redi delle classi dominanti e i ‘tesori’ delle chiese,” in Gioielli. Storia, linguaggio, religiosità dell’ornamento in Sardegna, ed. Paolo Piquereddu (Nuoro, 2004), 45–79 at 48–49.

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however, its use changed to protect breastfed babies, like a pedra de migraña or estanja sanch. Likewise, to protect children from the evil eye, the kokko or pinnadellu, sabegia or adzabeja in Catalan, was used.91 Earrings were called arrecades, orellas, or orels. Simple rings, without precious gems, were also common, as were diamante and rosaries, which were also called the saltire.92 Finally, let us look at Catalan influence in Sardinian cuisine. Many names of dishes and traditional meals in Sardinia resonate with Iberian culture. For example, su murzu or smurzu for meal, resembles the Spanish almuerzo or the Catalan word esmorzar (breakfast). Many words related to fishing or fish dishes also sound similar to Catalan words with the same or similar meaning. The fish-hook, for example, is called aguglia and an anchovy is anciova. The same happens with many dishes in the area of Cagliari, such as sa capponada, scabècciu, sa cassòla, or with soups, like sa suppa de allu. We see the same for another traditional dish, su ghisàu, or for fideus, and many other food products, pastries, and wines. Nevertheless, like all the other Catalan and Spanish cultural influences, detailed research is needed.93 If we turn to Algherese cuisine and wines, they have retained multiple traces of Iberian cuisine, combining Sardinian and Italian styles of cooking, little changed down the centuries.94

Conclusions

This brief survey of salient elements of Sardinian culture reveals an obvious Catalan influence, which reflects the medi­eval and early-modern past, but remains evident today. Any study of the identity and historical memory of the Sardinian people will show traits of the Catalan-Aragonese past in many areas. The Sardinian parliament, to which so many autonomist—and separatist—tendencies repeatedly appeal, evokes a past far removed from the present-day Italian unified state. The parliament’s origins and evolution down the centuries show a strong Catalan-Aragonese flavour. We find traces of those who were the Sardinian urban elites, especially in the south of the island. They go back to the new feudal system of the fourteenth century and the creation of new lineages, people who, marrying into earlier and later ruling classes, still hold high social, economic, and cultural positions. On the other hand, the collective memory of the Sardinian people holds various national symbols, formed under Catalan domination and since become part of the island’s popular culture. Language is the most obvious and strongest symbol of nationhood, as it defines members of the same group.95 But here too Catalan presence on the 91  Paolo Piquereddu, “Magia e ornamenti preziosi,” in Gioielli. Storia, linguaggio, religiosità dell’ornamento in Sardegna, ed. Paolo Piquereddu (Nuoro, 2004), 317–69 at 326. 92  Porcu, “La diffusione del gioiello nella Sardegna,” 53–56.

93  Pilia, “Influsi della cultura catalana sulle tradizioni popolari sarde,” 486–89. 94  Carlo Sechi, La cuina tradicional de l’Alguer (Alghero, 2008), 10–16.

95  Marta Rovira, “La institucionalització de la identitat: el cas català i els seus reptes?,” in Les identitats a la Catalunya contemporània, ed. Jordi Casassas (Cabrera de Mar, 2009), 29.

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island is still evident through both place names and the Sardinian language, the various dialects of which have been enriched with more than six thousand Catalan loanwords.96 We have shown Catalan influences in the artistic and craft world, and in popular culture, particularly in religious folklore.97 One need only consider the spiritual strength of the Virgin of Bonaria, enthroned Patroness of Sardinia, who draws thousands of pilgrims every year to her shrine in Cagliari, a shrine after all that was built thanks to Catalan-Aragonese devotion. Meanwhile Bonaria remains a common female name on the island. Traditional Sardinian dress is full of Iberian elements, be it in the typo­logy of the fabrics used, the names of the parts of the dress, or the many jewels that ornament it. Similarly, Catalan influences are still visible in many traditional dishes, wines, pastries, and cooking implements. Sardinia preserves many lieux de mémoire, locations, buildings, or areas that store images of a past charged with meaning. Commemorative places, where civic rituals with a strong political and symbolic content are performed, become locations where a feeling of belonging to a specific group is transmitted.98 In many such memorial sites the Catalan past can still be perceived, either in opposition to a specific Sardinian identity, or absorbed and honoured by the Sardinian population as strongholds of their identity. One mindset perceives such elements as those of the “invader” and therefore as the basis on which they could proclaim and reclaim a different status for Sardinia, either claiming autonomous government or even an independence that history denied the island. The Battle of Sanluri is an example of this way of thinking in relation to memorial sites. It is performed every year and encapsulates a shared feeling of a people commemorating the defeat of the Giudicato of Arborea in 1409 by the Catalan army; an adapted and repeatedly remembered chapter of history, charged with meaning and political power. Note the dichotomy (if we look from the opposing side) and the extraordinary symbolic strength of the burial monument in Cagliari Cathedral in honour of Martin “The Younger,” whose fate was inextricably linked to this battle. Many Catalans believe that something much more than the remains of a king is buried here. For them, this burial monument is transformed into an ode to the end of a glorious period, evoked by late nineteenth-century Catalan historians as being the great Catalan Renaixença.99 The Shrine of Our Lady of Bonaria probably stands as the clearest example of the second, more inclusive, category mentioned. It is a lieu de mémoire marked by a strong Catalan-Aragonese influence but, having thoroughly permeated Sardinian culture over 96  Maurizio Virdis, “Il Catalano e il Sardo in rapporto,” in La Battaglia di Sanluri come scontro fra culture: quanto simili e quanto diverse? Atti del convegno di studi (Las Plassas, 24 giugno 2007), ed. Francesca Carrada, Gesuino Murru, and Giovanni Serreli (Dolianova, 2008), 135–42.

97  Franco Garelli, “Religione e identità,” in L’identità fra Tradizione e Progetto. Nazioni, luoghi, culture. Atti del Convegno 28–30 novembre 1996, ed. Cesare Mozzarelli (Trento, 1997), 125. 98  Fabietti, Matera, Memorie e identità, 35–37; Balcells, “Els llocs de memoria,” 89.

99  Esther Martí�, “The Battle of Sanluri in the process of recreating Sardinian identity,” in Perverse Identities. Identities in Conflict, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Bern, 2015), 119–46. Gallinari, Martí�, “The Medi­eval Heritage,” 501–2.

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the centuries, has become one of the cornerstones of the jigsaw puzzle of Sardinian identity. Let us conclude by showing the complexity of this topic, with the latent dichotomy of Alghero, a city the Catalan motherland sees as a survivor and historical refuge. It remains an extremely popular destination for tourists in Sardinia, while encapsulating a different identity within those of Sardinia. Such a fact demonstrates that identity is not simple, not binary, but a continuum.100 It is inadvisable to fetishize identity, to sacrifice our reason in the name of authenticity.101 This has important implications for contemporary political tendencies: claims to an exclusive identity that reject real recognition (in Sardinia, see the conservative model of perfetta fusione), or a nativist, residencebased paradigm, as put forward by Lilliu in the 1970s, where identity was seen as a synonym for purity.102

100  José Martí�n Hurtado, “La identitad,” A Parte Rei. Revista de Filosofía 28 (2003): 1–10 at 5. 101  Fabietti, L’identità etnica, 162.

102  Alberto Contu, “Retoriche dell’identità. Un approccio metodo­logico al dibattito in Sardegna,” Quaderni bolotanesi 22 (1996): 17–29.

Chapter 16

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH LEGAL HISTORY AND THE MEMORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES LUIS ROJAS DONAT

The nineteenth century saw a high point in the dialectical conflict between civilization and barbarity that began with the eighteenth-century “Enlightened” philosophers. This opposition was decidedly not neutral but moral and exerted a powerful influence on the nineteenth-century view of the recent and more distant past. This represented a worldview. The grand aspiration of European nations was to disown barbarity and create a civilized society. This required certain ideals of unity and virtuous customs, none of which could be instituted without a set of laws wisely and rigorously administered by a strong, centralized state. In such an environment, historians looked back to Antiquity, particularly the Roman world, where, through study of laws, they discovered a society “arranged” by a “state” that enforced the law. Traditional legal history has concerned itself with the correct application of laws and has attempted to discover the “legal state” of the Early Middle Ages, an institution like the one (they believed) existed before the ruin of the Western Roman world, which could be found in the modern world. I intend to look at the approach of a number of nineteenth-century French historians through one exemplary topic. A core aspect of any legal question concerns ways of resolving conflicts and through this prism I want to focus not on ordeals, judgements, and the like, but revenge or faida.1 The “Natural State” of the Early Middle Ages

With this intellectual framework, it is no surprise that French nineteenth-century historio­graphy had already made a value judgement about the medi­eval judicial system. The “Roman State,” diluted in the last centuries of the Empire, would, according to *  This chapter is part of a larger project titled “Alteridad jurí�dica en el Occidente medi­eval: las ordalí�as,” financed by the Chilean Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cientí�fico y Tecnológico of the Ministerio de Educación (ref. no. 1110474), 2011–2012.

1  The definition of faida is not clear in documents from the Merovingian epoch. However, in Lombard law, its meaning is quite clear: “Faida, id est inimiatia. Propter faida deponenda, id est inimiatiam pacificandam,” from the “Edictum Rotharis,” in Corpus Iuris Germinici Antigui, ed. Ferdinand Walter (Berlin, 1824), 691 (chap. 45); 693 (chap. 74); 706 (chap 162); “Liutprandi leges,” in Corpus Iuris Germinici Antigui, ed. Walter, 807 (chap. 119). See ‘Faida’ in Du Cange, Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis, 10 vols. (Niort, 1884), 3:396–97. Luis Rojas Donat ([email protected]) is Professor of Medi­eval and Modern History at the Universidad del Bí�o-Bí�o, Chillán, Chile.

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certain historians, degenerate into a “natural state” in the West. This is an interpretative paradigm, a set of ideas organized through a logic or, if one prefers, a pre-existing framework of references, to analyze the events of the past. So, the theory by which this particular past is interpreted also responds to the conditions imposed by its historical setting. With regard to the theme of revenge, the context is a typical nineteenth-century debate, loaded with nationalism, that confronted German historians attempting to highlight the sense of justice—not barbarity—of the ancient Germans, and French historians who sought to demonstrate the strong Romanization the Gallo-Roman population had already undergone before the Germanic invasions, compared with the primitive customs the latter introduced into Gaul. This had consequences for nineteenth-century French legal historio­graphy, with few law historians drawn to the medi­eval period. They considered this pan-Germanic institution (eine gemeingermanische Institution) as evidence that not only was there no judicial system, but even more, there was no authentic rule of law. That explains why the French left it to their German colleagues to explain the epoch of the supposed “feudal order” inherited from their ancestors, the Franks, writing the period off as one of judicial “anarchy.” Adopting this dismissive approach, French historio­graphy concentrated on the epoch after the thirteenth century, when judicial institutions began to acquire a degree of organization at the ecclesiastical and municipal levels, together with the creation of royal courts. In this new setting, progress can be seen in procedures used in courts: improvements in the system of evidence, advances in the way investigations were carried out, changing from the accusatory procedure to the inquisitory, and the rise of extraordinary processes based on secrecy and the use of torture. Further, in the thirteenth century, legal texts accompanied by scholarly commentaries on customary law appeared, and jurists’ comments on law suggested wise law developed by experts. French historians turned to this “classical” medi­eval time, when, it was said, law was born. During this epoch the judicial system was imposed on society, giving the judge a fundamental tool for judging; from then on, a conviction would be based on rational investigation. Judicial procedures were seen to pursue three essential objectives: to establish the truth about the crime; determine the person responsible; and, then, apply the deserved punishment as defined by the pertinent legal code, all this founded on the conviction of the judge. The historio­graphic paradigm imposed in the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the Germanic epoch was as follows: morally, it was a period for humans still close to the “natural state,” governed by instinct, and this persisted into feudal society. The early medi­eval West was characterized by the lack of objective law (written laws) to overcome the preponderance of subjective law (customs). Without these prerequisites a juridical order as such could not exist during the Middle Ages. Let us now look at four examples of this approach. Other than a small number of romantics, few people sympathized with the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century. Rationalism dominated not only in the exact sciences but also in the humanities. In general, the medi­eval was seen as a regressive period, a return to a zero state of civilization. During these long centuries after the Roman state disap-

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peared in the West, society was said to have been characterized by anarchy, oppression, violence, and injustice due to the lack of public powers. French liberal historians, immersed in intense political self-reflection shortly after the Revolution and the French Empire, were particularly sensitive to this view. Seeing the Middle Ages as a period dominated by the irrationality of faith meant it could not be an epoch of progress but rather of barbarity. François Guizot

Thus, François Guizot (1787–1874) stated, in a course in the Sorbonne in 1828, that between the fifth and ninth centuries—when the Germans dominated Europe—various attempts were made to remove forms of barbarianism from European society, especially in Italy and in Southern Gaul. In these places, Roman society had been less affected than elsewhere; in the cities particularly more order and life survived. This analysis, namely the prejudice of identifying Germanism with barbarity and Romanity with civilization, was followed by almost all French historio­graphy into the mid-twentieth century.2 Guizot’s reflection was necessarily done from premises that we should clarify: it conceived that human history could only be regarded with pride when all members of society could enjoy full freedom and respect for others. Yet, there have been periods when freedom and equality turned into anarchy and rule of the strongest. The author was of the opinion that the transformation of society was rooted fundamentally in a slow, but irreversible, progress of the moral state of the human being. In his words, Man carries in himself a number of notions of order, justice, reason, a desire to make them prevail, to turn them into reality in the environment where he lives; he is constantly working for them, and if the social state he lives in continues, his work has a certain effect. Man puts reason, morality, legitimacy into the world where he lives. Independently of man’s work, by a law of Providence that is impossible to ignore, analogous to the law which governs the material world, there is a certain degree of order, reason, justice, which is essential for a society to last.3

Guizot’s profound reflection is, however, full of prejudices. In many passages, he uses the word “barbarian” to refer to the customs, institutions, or ideas of the Germanic peoples. For instance, when talking about Visigothic Spain, he states that once Romanized by the Hispanic Church, they replaced their “barbarian” Visigothic customs with the Roman principles. He offers two aspects that interest us here: 2  François Guizot, Cours d’Histoire moderne. Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (Paris, 1828), 28; François Guizot, Cours d’Histoire moderne. Histoire de la civilisation en France depuis la chute de l’Empire romain (Paris, 1828–1832).

3  “L’homme porte en lui-même un certain nombre de notions d’ordre, de justice, de raison, un certain besoin de les faire prévaloir, de les introduire dans les faits au milieu desquels il vit; il y travaille sans cesse; et si l’état social où il est placé continue, son travail a un certain effet. L’homme met de la raison, de la moralité, de la légitimité dans le monde au milieu duquel il vit. Indépendamment du travail de l’homme, par une loi de la Providence qu’il est impossible de méconnaî�tre, loi analogue à celle qui régit le monde matériel, il y a une certaine mesure d’ordre, de raison, de justice, qui est indispensable pour qu’une société dure.” Cited from Guizot, Cours d’Histoire moderne, 71 (lecture on May 2, 1828).

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Among the barbarians, men had, according to their situation, a set worth. The Barbarian, the Roman, the free man, the leud, etc., were not valued at the same price; there was a rate for their lives. The principle of the equal worth of men before the law was established in the law of the Visigoths. Look at the procedural system: instead of an oath by the compurgatores or judicial combat, you will find evidence, rational examination of fact, as is done in a civilized society4

Nothing much could be expected from what followed the transitional era, namely feudalism, heir to this barbarism. During this time, he said, force was the real and habitual guarantee of right, “if one can call force a guarantee.”5 With this logic, he argues that social progress must firstly be judged by its capacity for replacing private will with public rule, and, secondly, legal resistance must prevail over the private. Social order, he argued, cannot function without these realities.6 The right to private revenge and ordeals, Guizot stated, was introduced into Gaul with the arrival of the Germans; these were clear examples of the characteristic irrationality of barbarity, incompatible with true legal order. The right to revenge was typical of humans with unlimited freedom in a natural state. However, according to Guizot, when the Germans settled, they managed to create some semblance of social organization, with compensations and duels demonstrating more civilized formulae to allow the working of society. The Frenchman believed that these few displays of progress, although small steps towards ending the state of war of everyone against everybody, did not guarantee legal order, argued by the German historian Karl August Rogge, and commented on by Guizot. Referring to Rogge’s theory of a certain primitive legal order, Guizot stated: From many ingenious views, and some probable explanations of the former Germanic social state, in this system, I think, there is a general mistake and a great lack of intelligence of mankind and the barbaric society. Gentlemen, if I have explained myself well, now you know where the great mistake of admirers of the barbarous state lies. On one hand, it suffers from poor development, whether public power or inequality. Moreover, due to the extension of individual freedom found there, they have concluded that society, despite the harshness of its forms, was basically normal in its state, under the rule of its legitimate principles […]. But they forgot one thing: they did not bother to compare, under these two concepts of social life, the same men. They forgot that, in the former, coarse, ignorant, violent, governed by passion, always willing to use force, they were

4  “Chez les Barbares, les hommes avaient, selon leur situation, une valeur déterminée; le Barbare, le Romain, l’homme libre, le leude, etc., n’étaient pas estimés au même prix; il y avait un tarif de leurs vies. Le principe de l’égale valeur des hommes devant la loi est établi dans la loi des Visigoths. Regardez au système de procédure; au lieu du serment des compurgatores, ou du combat judiciaire, vous trouverez la preuve par témoins, l’examen rationnel du fait tel qu’il peut se faire dans une société civilisée.” Cited from Guizot, Cours d’Histoire moderne, 88.

5  “La force, telle était, sous le régime féodal, la garantie véritable et habituelle du droit, si on peut appeler la force une garantie.” Cited from François Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (Paris, 1951), 103. 6  “Le progrès de la société est précisément de substituer, d’une part, les pouvoirs publics aux volontés particulières; de l’autre, la résistance légale à la résistance individuelle. C’est là le grand but, le principal perfectionnement de l’ordre social.” Cited from Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation, 31.

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incapable of living in peace according to reason and justice, that is, living in society without an external power that restricted them.7

Guizot’s thesis emphasized that this barbarity only finally began to disappear when the alliance between the monarchy and the communes (which later became the “Third Estate”) enabled civilization to advance and supersede the feudal, one would almost have to say Germanic, social state. Guizot could form no other impression of Germanic law other than its barbarity with his foundation of strongly liberal post-revolutionary rationalism. That is patent in the following passage: “the progress of society mainly consists of changing man, of making him capable of freedom, in other words, able to govern himself according to reason.”8 With this assertion, Guizot would influence all the later historio­graphy with the idea that the inability to construct an effective legal order throughout the medi­eval epoch was due to the primitive and barbarous nature of Germanic law introduced at the beginning of that period. Ernest-Désiré Glasson

In France, the “school of exegesis” of the civil code in the law faculties continued to influence the poor perception of Germanic customary laws when compared with Roman law. This delayed the birth of an authentic history of law, as seen in the opinions of ErnestDésiré Glasson (1839–1907) in his Histoire du droit et des institutiones de la France, where he writes of the consequences of the arrival of the Germans in the West: The uses of the Germans were absolutely insufficient for a civilized people. One searches in vain for any trace of administration; nothing about finance; property poorly defined and for the land, at least a partial communism; a crude and formalistic procedure; evidence made entirely ridiculous; in short, the right to revenge and private wars. This is what the Germans brought with them to the Roman Empire. They thus took society back to the point where it was in Gaul at the time of the conquest by Caesar. The benefits of Roman civilization largely disappeared; for centuries the social status was that of an emerging people. Some Germanic elements undoubtedly mingled with those of the Roman Empire and finally this merger, under the influence of the nation, gave birth to

7  “À� travers beaucoup de vues ingénieuses, et quelques explications probables de l’ancien état social germanique, il y a, je crois, dans ce système, une méprise générale et un grand défaut d’intelligence de l´homme et de la société barbare. Si je me suis bien expliqué, Messieurs, vous savez maintenant où réside la grande erreur des admirateurs de l’état barbare: frappés d’une part du peu de développement, soit de la puissance publique, soit de l’inégalité, d’autre part de l’étendue de liberté individuelle qui s’y rencontre, ils en ont conclu que la société, malgré la rudesse de ses formes, était au fond dans son état normal, sous l’empire de ses principes légitimes […] Ils n’ont oublié qu’une seul chose; ils ne se sont point inquiété de comparer, à ces deux termes de la vie sociale, les hommes eux-mêmes; ils ont oublié que, dans le premier, grossiers, ignorants, violents, gouvernés par la passion, toujours près de recourir à la force, ils étaient incapables de vivre en paix selon la raison et la justice, c’est-à-dire de vivre en société sans une puissance extérieure qui les y contraignî�t.” Cited from Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation, 350.

8  “Le progrès de la société consiste surtout à changer l’homme lui-même, à le rendre capable de liberté, c’est-à-dire capable de se gouverner lui-même selon la raison.” Cited from Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation, 350.

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the monarchy and the Church, to a new society. We shall say no more for now. It seems, however, clearly established that French civilization was not originally from Germany; we will have to look elsewhere for its creative genius.9

Even when the author attempts rigour in his analysis, offering scholarly references, making efforts to test his ideas at each step, he doubts medi­eval civilization because of the traditional use of ordeals then. The clash between “faith” and “reason” appears throughout the work, as in the following passage: It is a natural tendency for coarse and primitive peoples to invoke divinity constantly. The oldest laws also present the ordeals as an ordinary means of proof. It was already a great step forward not to admit them except in the absence of other evidence. This progress is enshrined in most Leges.10

For Glasson, the frequent use of the judicial duel as a resource for resolving conflicts among the Germans was an example of the state of barbarity of many primitive peoples: As for the origins of this form of evidence, we must also know that it is not exclusive to the Germans; this is again one of those institutions common to all primitive legislations, and shows the barbarity of the early times. Only some peoples managed to get rid of this rough and narrow formalism appropriately.11

Paraphrasing the nineteenth-century view, Romanized, civilized Gaul, which one must almost call France, was barbarized during the medi­eval period by the influence of the Germanic people, that is, the modern Germans. The problems over national identity that the French and Germans suffered during the nineteenth century noticeably affected historical interpretations. Here the reader can see some fruits of the seed planted by Guizot. 9  “Les usages des Germains étaient absolument insuffisants pour un peuple civilisé. On chercherait en vain la trace d’une administration quelconque; pas des finances; la propriété mal définie et pour les terres un communisme au moins partiel; une procédure grossière et formaliste; des moyens de preuves tout-à-fait ridicules; enfin le droit de vengeance et les guerres privées. Voilà ce que les Germains ont apporté avec eux dans l’Empire romain. Ils ont ainsi remis la société au point où elle était parvenue en Gaule au temps de la conquête de César. Les bienfaits de la civilisation romaine ont en grande partie disparu; pendant plusieurs siècles l’état social s été celui d’un peuple qui est en voie de formation. Certains éléments germaniques se sont incontestablement mêlés à ceux de l’Empire romain et de cette fusion est enfin née, sous l’influence de la nation, de la royauté et de l’É� glise, une société nouvelle. Nous n’en dirons pas davantage pour le moment. Il nous paraî�t toutefois établi que la civilisation française n’est pas sortie de la Germanie; il nous faudra chercher ailleurs son génie créateur.” Cited from Ernest-Désiré Glasson, Histoire du droit et des institutions de la France, 8 vols. (Paris, 1888), 2:84–85.

10  “C’est une tendance naturelle aux peuples primitifs et grossiers de faire intervenir sans cesse la divinité. Aussi les législations les plus anciennes nous présentent-elles les ordalies comme un moyen de preuve ordinaire. On réalise déjà un progrès en ne les admettant qu’à défaut d’autres preuves. Ce progrès est consacré par la plupart des Leges.” Cited from Glasson, Histoire du droit, 2:507. 11  “Quant à l’origine de ce moyen de preuve, il faut bien reconnaitre aussi qu’il n’était pas propre aux Germains; il s’agit encore là d’une de ces institutions communes à toutes les législations primitives et qui dénotent la barbarie des premiers temps. Quelques peuples seulement ont su se dégager de bonne heure de ce formalisme grossier et étroit.” Cited from Glasson, Histoire du droit, 2:515.

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Gabriel Monod

Other authors can be cited alongside Glasson. They include Gabriel Monod (1844–1912), one of the leading founders of the methodical school, who published an article in 1886 in which he analyzed a case of revenge that took place in the sixth century, discussed by Gregory of Tours, where all those involved were, he claims, of Germanic and not GalloRoman origin.12 Despite his characteristic sensitivity, his depiction of barbarian customs cannot be gloomier, as seen in the following passage: We will see all the primitive barbaric nature in all its savagery emerge in the characters that Gregory depicts. Brutalities without reason, a need for revenge that pushes man with the fate of an instinct, which is imposed on him as an inescapable duty, a disregard for human life, sudden bursts of passion that change in a second from the most tender friendship to a ruthless hatred, greed, looting, habits of drunkenness that cause fits of rude hilarity and sudden fury.13

We should acknowledge that the lines taken from Gregory of Tours were closer to the descriptions Tacitus gave of the Germans than a description of the customs of Merovingian Gaul. However, this merely corroborated the paradigm of Germanic primitivism. Monod reworked events in a very erudite way and submerged himself in the atmosphere of the era. Murderous outbursts motivated by various causes, like the death of a servant in this case, precipitated accidents that were common in Germanic society. He then attempted to explain the social organization of Frankish Gaul to understand events. The author believes the primitivism of the Germanic world impedes us from being able to judge the acts of savagery. The reader now realizes that Monod already held an opinion, and had already made his judgement: Can we really talk of the guilty, in the strict sense of the word, in a society that lived, sword in hand, where the irrepressible thrust of instincts and passions led to acts being committed of whose savagery there was barely awareness?14

12  Gabriel Monod, “Les aventures de Sichaire. Commentaires des chapitres xlvii du livre vii et xix du livre ix de l’Histoire des Francs de Grégoire de Tours,” Revue Historique 31 (1886): 259–90. This passage by Gregory generated a controversy between Monod and Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges, for which see Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions de l’ancienne France (Paris, 1874), 510 n. 1 and Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges, Recherches sur quelques problèmes d’histoire (Paris, 1894), 498.

13  “Nous allons voir d’ailleurs chez tous les personnages que Grégoire met en scène éclater dans toute sa sauvagerie la nature barbare primitive. Brutalités sans motifs, besoin de vengeance qui pousse l’homme avec la fatalité d’un instinct, et qui s’impose à lui comme un devoir inéluctable, mépris de la vie humaine, brusques sursauts de passion qui changent en une seconde l’amitié la plus tendre en une haine impitoyable, avidité au pillage, habitudes d’ivrognerie produisant des accès de gaieté grossière et de subite fureur.” Cited from Monod, “Les aventures de Sichaire,” 266. 14  “Pouvait-on d’ailleurs parler de coupables, au sens strict du mot, dans une société où l’on vivait l’épée à la main, où la poussée irrépressible des instincts et des passions faisait commettre des actes sauvages dont on avait à peine conscience?” Cited from Monod, “Les aventures de Sichaire,” 278.

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Monod interpreted Chramnesinde’s words as the awakening of the faida:

These words are enough to thoroughly upset the soul of Chramnesinde, to make him conceive in his barbaric consciousness this need for revenge as a bounden duty, the forgiveness of sins as the most cowardly of crimes, to arouse poignant remorse in him for not having washed in the blood of his enemy the blood of his father, his uncle, and his brother.15

So, barbarian and primitive customs constituted the spirit of the Merovingian age, a tradition that persisted through the feudal period well into the later Middle Ages. While Monod preconceives this society as one marked by barbarity, he then presents the contrast when, at the start of his study, he states that if civilization does not limit temperaments and instincts, barbarity will take over: It is very true that civilization puts a brake on temperament and instincts […]. There had to be in the spirit of these barbarians, still so close to primitive savagery, so similar to the Scandinavians in their state of civilization and moral conceptions, a much smaller difference between the murder of a man stained with the blood of your relatives and murder committed in self-defence.16

The article ends by highlighting that the passage from Gregory of Tours gives us an insight into the life of the Franks: [Knowing] how justice was dispensed in the courts, including those of the counts and the king’s; how the Church, sometimes clinging to the coarse pleasures of the barbarians, made them hear words of sweetness, of justice and charity who found with difficulty the path of their hearts, but who gradually shone the light of a higher idea onto their still obscured and troubled consciences.17

Guizot’s influence is clearly evident in many authors: the objective right of the law was unable to overcome the subjective right to revenge. So, it follows that, at the time, there really was no legal order as such.

15  “Ces paroles suffirent à bouleverser de fond en comble l’âme de Chramnesinde, à lui faire concevoir dans sa conscience de barbare ce besoin de vengeance comme un devoir impérieux, le pardon des offenses comme le plus lâche des crimes, à faire naî�tre en lui le remords poignant de n’avoir pas lavé dans le sang de son ennemi le sang de son père, de son oncle et de son frère.” Cited from Monod, “Les aventures de Sichaire,” 286. 16  “Il est très vrai que la civilisation met un frein aux tempéraments et aux instincts… Il devait y avoir dans l’esprit de ces barbares, encore si voisins de la sauvagerie primitive, si semblables aux Scandinaves par leur état de civilisation et leurs conceptions morales, une bien faible différence entre le meurtre d’un homme souillé du sang de vos proches et le meurtre commis en état de légitime défense.” Cited from Monod, “Les aventures de Sichaire,” 267 and 287.

17  “Comment on rendait la justice dans les tribunaux, dans ceux des comtes et dans celui du roi; comment enfin l’É� glise, qui s’associait parfois aux joies grossières des barbares, leur faisait entendre des paroles de douceur, de justice et de charité qui ne trouvaient que difficilement le chemin de leurs cœurs, mais qui faisait cependant luire peu à peu la lumière d’une idée supérieure dans leurs consciences encore obscures et troubles.” Cited from Monod, “Les aventures de Sichaire,” 290.

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Revisionary Approaches

Some scholars however added nuances to this view of the medi­eval past. We will look at five. Jean Marie Pardessus

In the first half of the nineteenth century Jean Marie Pardessus (1772–1853) studied the Salic Law. He was of the opinion that, in an epoch when brute force had so much power, the Franks understood they not could disguise the fact that the exercise of revenge led to a scandalous impunity in favour of the rich and powerful over the weak and unprotected.18 Precisely to favour the latter, fines were set to encourage victims to obtain monetary compensation without risking their lives in revenge. A search for peace by society required restrictions on the right to seek vengeance, while permitting revenge for certain serious crimes: I readily believe revenge was first banned for simple property offences when these were not accompanied by violence against people and that the victim was forbidden from doing anything except requesting justice. The good sense of the Germans enabled this change to the old customs to be accepted promptly and without regret. As any exercise of individual revenge consisted of assault, which endangered the lives of the attackers and the attacked, no one believed it advantageous to risk themselves, and all their properties, for a stolen or injured animal or any similar offence.19

Charlemagne’s legislative activity, he says, tried to adapt usages and customs relating to claims for damages, but the customary tradition interpreted the value system for the German population better than the Roman: The monarch sought to replace strength and individual independence with the rule of law. It would be nearer the truth if we said that Charlemagne made laws that were repeated many times to force the offended to be content with the legal fine, but which

18  “However, it is to be believed that sight was never lost of the project to gradually extinguish the opportunities for private wars entailed by the right to revenge. One could not conceal that in a society where brute force had so much power, it necessarily resulted in a scandalous impunity for the rich and powerful against the weak and the poor” (Toutefois il est à croire que jamais on ne perdit de vue le projet d’éteindre peu à peu les occasions de guerres privées qu’entraî�nait le droit de vengeance. On ne pouvait se dissimuler que, dans une société où la forcé brutale avait tant d’empire, il en résulterait nécessairement une scandaleuse impunité en faveur des riches et des puissants contre les faibles et les malheureux). Cited from Jean Marie Pardessus, Loi salique ou recueil contenant les anciennes rédactions de cette loi et el texte connu sous le nom de lex emendata (Paris, 1843), 655.

19  “Je crois volontiers que d’abord la vengeance fut interdite pour les simples atteintes à la propriété, lorsqu’elles n’étaient pas accompagnées de violences envers les personnes et qu’il fut défendu à l’offensé d’agir autrement que par une demande en justice. Le bon sens des Germains dut leur faire accepter promptement et sans regret cette modification aux anciennes coutumes. Comme tout exercice de la vengeance individuelle consistait en voies de fait, qui mettaient en danger la vie des attaquants et des attaqués, personne ne crut avoir intérêt à s’exposer soi-même, ainsi que toutes ses propriétés, pour un animal vole ou blessé, ou pour tout autre délit analogue.” Cited from Pardessus, Loi salique, 654–55.

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they were not yet required to accept. Charlemagne’s laws on this point did not confirm or certify ancient principles, they were reforms […]. But besides the restrictions on the exercise of individual revenge […] I think attention should be paid to the limits within which these rights were specific to the barbarians; the Romans did not enjoy them, as they were obliged to be content with fines determined by law.20

Despite seeking to produce a work with an objective point of view, adhering strictly to what the documents showed, Jean Marie Pardessus was aware that the theme compromised French and German political interests: While it is true that for two centuries […] the spirit of [the] system and the desire to uphold theories or political interests have often led writers who held opposing views very far, these controversies have not been useless for science, and the time has come when men concern themselves with the early days of our monarchy, free from prejudice, convinced that never, under any circumstances, is it acceptable to falsify history either to please the kings or to appeal to the peoples.21

He adheres to the opinion of Karl Friedrich von Savigny, who lamented commitments to any cause beyond scientific truth, and whom he quotes: “the French authors who have written on this subject, whatever the difference in their views, are alike in one respect: everyone has a particular political system to which they subject all their historical research.”22 There is no lack of expressions in the text that reveal prejudices difficult to eradicate: “true primitive state,”23 “society of brute force,”24 a history strewn with “coarse and still fierce manners”;25 before their conversion, the Germans were in the “heathen

20  “Le monarque cherchait à substituer l’empire des lois à celui de la forcé et de l’indépendance individuelle. On serait plus dans le vrai si l’on disait que, puisque Charlemagne a fait des lois souvent répétées pour obliger les offensés à se contenter de la composition légale, c’est que ces offensés n’y étaient pas encore obligés. Les lois de Charlemagne sur ce point ne sont pas la confirmation ou l’attestation de principes anciens, elles sont des réformes […] Mais, outre les restrictions apportées à l’exercice de la vengeance individuelle […] je crois qu’on doit encore faire attention aux limites dans lesquelles ce droit était spécial pour les barbares; que les Romains n’en jouissaient pas, et qu’ils étaient tenus de se contenter des compositions déterminées par la loi.” Cited from Pardessus, Loi salique, 660. 21  “S’il est vrai que, pendant deux siècles… l’esprit de système et le désir de faire prévaloir des théories ou des intérêts politiques aient souvent entraî�né trop loin les écrivains qui soutenaient des thèses opposées, ces controverses n’ont pas été inutiles à la science, et le moment est arrivé où les hommes qui s’occupent des premiers temps de notre monarchie, libres de préjugés, convaincus que jamais, sous aucun prétexte, il n’est permis de falsifier l’histoire, ni pour plaire aux rois ni pour plaire aux peoples.” Cited from Pardessus, Loi salique, 75.

22  “Les auteurs français qui ont écrit sur ce sujet, quelle que fût la différence de leurs opinions, se ressemblent en un point: chacun a un système politique déterminé auquel il soumet toutes ses recherches historiques.” Cited from Pardessus, Loi salique, 75. 23  “Véritable état primitive.” Cited from Pardessus, Loi salique, 654.

24  “Société de la force brutale.” Cited from Pardessus, Loi salique, 655.

25  “Mœurs grossières et même féroces.” Cited from Pardessus, Loi salique, 657.

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darkness.”26 Of course, few historians escape the hex of giving contradictory opinions after a bold pronouncement. Jean Joseph Thonissen

Thonissen (1817–1891) was a Belgian scholar, professor of law at the Catholic Uni­ver­ sity of Leuven, and also minister of state. An expert in the history of penal law, he dealt with the formative period in the legal organization of the barbarian kingdoms and he also discussed the topic of revenge. In a short work titled Du droit de vengeance dans la législation mérovingienne published in 1879,27 Thonissen claimed that the question of how civilized the Germans were, and to what extent they adhered to the law, had become the cause of historical and legal controversies, and these were still not fully resolved. Did the right to revenge exist, without limits or rules, among the Franks? And when they settled in the cities of Gaul, had they already limited their primitive freedom? In fact, the answers to these old questions compromised the national interests of the French at the end of the nineteenth century, committed as they were to identifying themselves with the Romanized Gauls and differentiating themselves from the Germans, represented here by the Frankish invaders. To start with, it is interesting to point out that Thonissen argues that in the general spirit of the primitive law of the Germans, despite their warlike passions and “adventurous mood,” they had the faida for the guilty party through which harm could be redressed. Seen from another point of view, this would extinguish the victim’s resentment for the damage caused, which would otherwise have been channelled through the right to revenge. Thus, “peace,” which had a very high value inside the Germanic community, was restored.28 Thonissen summarized the three scientific positions on these questions: the first is represented by Montesquieu and the publicists of his school, who maintained that the Germans’ right to revenge prior to the invasion had completely disappeared after the promulgation of the Salic Law, which tended to protect the criminal from revenge 26  “Ténèbres du paganisme.” Cited from Pardessus, Loi salique, 661.

27  Jean Joseph Thonissen, “Du droit de vengeance dans la législation mérovingienne,” Séances et Travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Compte–rendu 111 (1879): 45–61.

28  “It is indisputable that in the general spirit of the original right of the Germans, a part of the composition, referred to as faidus, was intended for redemption, or rather the extinction of the right to revenge belonging to the injured party. The culprit who paid the composition escaped the faida. His person and his property were placed under the protection of the law. He recovered ‘peace,’ that inner peace of the city to which the Germans of all races, despite their warlike passions and their adventurous mood, attached the highest price” (Il est incontestable que, dans l’esprit général du droit primitif des Germains, une partie de la composition, désignée sous le nom de faidus, était destinée au rachat, ou pour mieux dire à l’extinction du droit de vengeance appartenant à l’individu lésé. Le coupable qui payait la composition échappait à la faida. Sa personne et ses biens se trouvaient replacés sous la protection du droit commun. Il récupérait “la paix,” cette paix intérieure de la cité à laquelle les Germains de toutes les races, malgré leurs passions guerrières et leur humeur aventureuse, attachaient le plus haut prix). Cited from Thonissen, “Du droit de vengeance,” 45.

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and obliged the damaged party to accept the established financial compensation.29 The second, completely opposite, thesis was defended by some German jurists (Rogge, Kostlin, Waitz), who claimed that the legitimacy of revenge was the legal basis, the essential foundation, for all penal legislation of the Germanic peoples. All social life was dominated by this right to revenge, which constituted practically the only punishment.30 The third opinion, somewhat equidistant between the other two, was defended in France by Jean Marie Pardessus, with adherents in Germany, England, and Italy. This position argued that the Franks had in fact restricted the exercise of the right to revenge. However, bearing in mind the deep roots of popular customs in the collective awareness, they had restricted it to a certain number of very serious crimes: murder, rape, kidnapping, dangerous aggressions, and robberies of exceptional importance;31 in other words, in those crimes where the criminal broke the “peace” with the victim and the members of their family. So, Thonissen reaffirmed his position by stating: Just take a look at the legislative and judicial monuments of the Merovingian period, the chronicles and hagio­graphies of the time, to become convinced that the Franks settled in Gaul had, for a long time, seen disadvantages in such disordered vengeance, these brutal struggles, this implacable hatred. They did not have a distinct notion of the social damage that crime always provokes, even though it only seems to affect purely private interests; but they clearly perceived the benefits of legal order and legal repression, replacing the wanton and brutal action of individual revenge. They had the king’s court, local jurisdictions, a carefully regulated procedure, with ways applied in the public and private life. If the right to revenge, with the disorders and the dangers it entailed, still existed among the conquerors of Gaul, we must recognize that this appeared next to institutions and laws that were its living antithesis.32

29  “The bloody reprisals, which desolated peoples scattered in the forests of Germany, were not tolerated in the Christian cities of Gaul […] justice was nothing other than keeping the criminal away from the vengeance of the man whose rights he had harmed by forcing the latter to accept the satisfaction determined by the legislators” (Les représailles sanglantes, qui désolaient les peuplades disséminées dans les forêts de la Germanie, n’étaient plus tolérées dans les cités chrétiennes des Gaules […] la justice n’était autre chose que mettre le criminel à l’abri de la vengeance de l’homme dont il avait lésé des droits, en obligeant celui-ci à recevoir la satisfaction déterminée par le législateur). Cited from Thonissen, “Du droit de vengeance,” 48–49.

30  “The essential basis for any criminal laws of the Germanic peoples, even after their settlement on the ruins of the vast empire of the Caesars, was the legitimacy of revenge. It played a leading role in all the relations of social life; it was the main, if not the only legal sanction” (La base essentielle de toute la législation pénale des peuples germaniques, même après leur établissement sur les débris de l’immense empire des Césars, était la légitimité de la vengeance. Celle-ci jouait un rôle prédominant dans toute les relations de la vie sociale; elle constituait la principale, pour ne pas dire l’unique sanction du droit). Cited from Thonissen, “Du droit de vengeance,” 49. 31  “Among the Franks [who had] become Christians, the right to revenge was not admitted without brakes and without limits. It was claimed it existed only for murder and the most serious crimes, such as rape, abduction, dangerous injuries and robberies of exceptional importance” (Chez les Franks devenus chrétiens, le droit de vengeance n’était pas admis sans frein et sans limites. On prétend qu’il n’y existait plus que pour le meurtre et les crimes les plus graves, tels que le viol, le rapt, les blessures dangereuses et les vols d’une importance exceptionnelle). Cited from Thonissen, “Du droit de vengeance,” 50. 32  “Il suffit de jeter un coup d’œil sur les monuments législatifs et judiciaires de l’époque

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Finally, adhering to the thesis of Pardessus, he concluded with the fact that the right to revenge existing in France under Merovingian rule for serious crimes like murder is shown by both the laws and the chronicles.33

Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges

Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) moved away from Pardessus and Thonissen, on this specific topic and in general. He followed the tradition of Tacitus: to compensate for a murder, the Germans had to hand over a certain number of head of livestock to the victim’s family. The explanation he gives to how this practice—wergeld— came to Gaul is interesting: An analogous use appears in Gaul after the invasion, either because it was imposed on the land by the new invaders, or as the natural result of social disorder and the limited ability of the public authority to punish crimes.34

Fustel de Coulanges attributes this peculiar way of administering justice, based on the status of each person within society, to the lack of organized state institutions. Society recognized its own inequality: It was therefore a rule in the societies of those times that every man had his price set and fixed by law. None of the laws permitted fines, but all had the wergeld, i.e., the price of every human life […]. This rule provides a sure means for the historian to know the social status of that time. If this had been a democratic society, the law would have attributed the same price to all people. On the contrary, as the prices were very different, and there was a whole range of different values, it was because society was legally compartmentalized into unequal classes.35

mérovingienne, sur les chroniques et les hagio­graphies du temps, pour acquérir immédiatement la conviction que les Franks établis dans les Gaules avaient aperçu, depuis longtemps, les inconvénients de ces vengeances désordonnées, de ces luttes brutales, de ces haines implacables. Ils ne possédaient pas une notion distincte de la lésion sociale que produit toujours le délit, alors même qu’il paraî�t n’atteindre que des intérêts purement privés; mais ils avaient clairement aperçu les avantages de l’ordre légal et de la répression légale, substitués à l’action brutale et déréglée de la vengeance individuelle. Ils avaient un tribunal du roi, des juridictions locales, une procédure soigneusement ordonnée, des voies d’exécutions nettement essentielles de la vie publique et de la vie privée. Si le droit de vengeance, avec les désordres et les périls qu’il traî�ne à la suite, existait encoré parmi les conquérants des Gaules, il faut bien reconnaî�tre qu’il y figurait à côté d’institutions et de lois qui en étaient l’antithèse vivante.” Cited from Thonissen, “Du droit de vengeance,” 47.

33  Thonissen, “Du droit de vengeance,” 55–61; Jean Joseph Thonissen, “L’organisation judiciaire, le droit pénal et la procédure pénale de la loi salique,” Nouveaux mémoires de l’académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Bruxelles 44 (1882): 101–31. 34  “Un usage analogue se retrouve en Gaule après l’invasion, soit qu’il ait été imposé ay pays par les nouveaux venus, soit qu’il fût l’effet naturel du désordre social et de l’impuissance de l’autorité publique à punir les crimes.” Cited from Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 482.

35  “C’était donc une règle dans les sociétés de cette époque que chaque homme eût son prix déterminé et fixé par la loi. Toutes les législations n’admettaient pas la composition, mais toutes avaient le wergeld, c’est-à-dire le tarif de chaque vie humaine […] Cette règle offre à j’historien un moyen sûr de connaî�tre s’état social du temps. Si cette société avait été démocratique, la loi aurait attribué le même prix à toutes les existences. Puisque, tout au contraire, les prix sont fort inégaux et

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He acknowledges that, regrettably, this way of resolving conflicts, which should be evaluated objectively, had generated a very dangerous interpretative bias: The opinion that places a major invasion at the beginning of our history, one that has divided the French population into two unequal races since then, appeared in the sixteenth century and especially in the eighteenth. It was born of antagonism. It still weighs on our society: a dangerous opinion, which has generated misconceptions in the mind about how human societies are formed, and has spread feelings of bitterness and revenge in hearts. It is hatred that spawned it, and it perpetuates hatred.36

And he continued,

[…] Germanic law and Roman law coexisted for some time. But as this duality faded, it was German law that gave way. There was no effect on French law […]. All the customs of the Germans gradually disappeared: French law was established following the principles of Roman law and with no other changes than those that were required by the new social state of the country […]. As for the customs and character of the nation, we do not see that the Germans there have left an imprint. To believe that Roman society was corrupt and that the barbarians regenerated it is a very modern idea […]. When you compare, from documents without bias of any kind, the moral state of Gaul before and after the entry of the Germans, one is forced to acknowledge that before this event, private life was calmer, more orderly, more regular, and that after this event, there was much more covetousness, debauchery and crime. This is not to say that the Germans brought new vices, but all the vices of human nature were then unleashed, as always happens with social disorder.37

Fustel de Coulanges argues that no Germanic people organized along the rules described by Tacitus entered the Empire. After various generations, they lost many of their political institutions, and were no longer peoples but rather armies (n’étaient pas des peuples; qu’il y a toute une échelle de valeurs diverses, c’est que la société est légalement partagée en clases inégales.” Cited from Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 485.

36  “L’opinion qui place au début de notre histoire une grande invasion et qui partage dès lors la population française en deux races inégales, n’a commencé à poindre qu’au seizième siècle et a surtout pris crédit au dix-huitième. Elle est née de l’antagonisme. Elle pèse encore sur notre société présente: opinion dangereuse, qui a répandu dans les esprits des idées fausses sur la manière dont se constituent les sociétés humaines, et qui a aussi répandu dans les cœurs des sentiments mauvais de rancune et vengeance. C’est la haine qui l’a engendrée, et elle perpétue la haine.” Cited from Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 397.

37  “Le droit germanique et le droit romain vivre quelque temps côte à côte; mais à mesure que cette dualité s’est effacée, c’est le droit germanique qui a cédé la place. Il n’a pas eu d’action sur le droit français […]. Toutes les coutumes des Germains ont peu à peu disparu; le droit français s’est constitué suivant les principes du droit romain et sans autres modifications que celles qui étaient rendues nécessaires par le nouvel état social du pays […]. Quant aux mœurs et au caractère de la nation, on ne voit pas non plus que les Germains y aient mis leur empreinte. Croire que la société romaine était corrompue et que les barbares l’ont régénérée, est une opinion toute moderne […]. Quand on compare, d’après les documents et sans partialité d’aucune sorte, l’état moral de la Gaule avant et après l’entrée des Germains, on est force de reconnaî�tre qu’avant cet événement la vie privée était plus calme, mieux ordonné, plus régulière, et qu’après ce même événement il y a eu beaucoup plus de convoitises, de débauches, de crimes. Ce n’est pas à dire que les Germains aient apporté des vices nouveaux; mais tous les vices de la nature humaine furent alors déchaî�nés, ainsi qu’il arrive toujours dans le désordre social.” Cited from Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 419.

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ils n’etaient que des armées). There was no cultural trace of the Germans in the traditions of France, as “the invasion did not bring Gaul any new blood, nor a new language, nor a new character, nor essentially Germanic institutions. This is not how it had consequences for the future.”38 Their influence had to be sought in the impact and disorder they provoked, demolishing Roman authority, suppressing the already weakened laws with which society had long lived. The resulting disorganization led to the rise of new needs and new customs in society and that, with time, led to new social rules.39 Indeed, when Fustel de Coulanges refers to the dominion exerted by the Franks in Gaul, starting from the Merovingian family, he states they did not intend to destroy the established political institutions they found there, but they rather felt themselves to be the continuation of the Roman order, ruling in the Roman way. In response to the German thesis that under German public law the royalty were elected by the people, Fustel de Coulanges argued this claim is not based on any fact or document. And this is explained by the lack of public law among the Germans, as the inheritance was universally accepted and royalty was simply an inheritance.40 On the contrary, citing Gregory of Tours, royal authority was not considered to emanate from the people, but rather was conceived as a power that was imposed on them; the warriors say to Clovis, “we are under the yoke of your domination: you may do what you please, and no one can resist your power.”41 The nation had no political rights, nor was it thought to have them, as there are no indications that national assemblies were constituted until a century after Clovis. These were even then far from being national and not based on any principle of public freedom. The people did not deliberate over the 38  “L’invasion n’a apporté en Gaule ni un sang nouveau, ni une nouvelle langue, ni un nouveau caractère, ni des institutions essentiellement germaniques. Ce n’est pas par là qu’elle a eu de grandes conséquences pour l’avenir.” Cited from Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 420.

39  “But it put the disorder into society, and it is for that reason that it exercised a considerable influence on the following ages. By dropping the Roman authority, it abandoned the rules, already much weakened, under which society had long lived. By the same disorder that spread everywhere, it gave men new needs and new habits, which in turn gave birth to new social rules” (Mais elle a mis le trouble dans la société, et c’est par cela même qu’elle a exercé une action considérable sur les âges suivants. En faisant tomber l’autorité romaine, elle a supprimé les règles, déjà fort affaiblies, sous les-quelles la société avait longtemps vécu. Par le désordre même qu’elle a jeté partout, elle a donné aux hommes de nouveaux besoins et de nouvelles habitudes, qui à leur tour ont enfanté de nouvelles règles sociales). Cited from Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 420.

40  “Some historians have professed that the public law of the Franks prescribed that the king was elected by the people; but this assertion is not based on fact, on any document of that time […] the hereditary principal was universally accepted. The monarchy was seen as a heritage […] the kingdom was divided like any other heritage” (Quelques historiens ont professé que le droit public de Francs prescrivait que le roi fût élu par le peuple; mais cette assertion ne s’appuie sur aucun fait, sur aucun document de cette époque […] le prí�ncipe d’hérédité était universellement admis. La royauté était considérée comme un patrimoine […] La royauté se partageait comme tout autre patrimoine). Cited from Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 426–27.

41  “Nos ipsi tuo sumus dominio subjugati; quod tibi placitum videtur, facito; nullus potestati tuae resistere valet.” From Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, II, 27, cited by Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 427.

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decisions of kings, who were obeyed equally by both the Gallo-Romans and the Franks. The so-called Champs de Mars were not assemblies of citizens, but rather reviews of soldiers. However, we do see a wish to believe that these assemblies of warriors (as Fustel de Coulanges claims, referring to the opinions of German authors who he does not, however, cite in the text or the notes) were typical of the Germanic race, and a desire to assimilate the Germans into the level of political civilization of the Romans, who did have a type of deliberative assemblies, where the soldiers made noise by rattling their arms. As he said, “We must refrain from attributing customs that belong to all human nature to one race.”42 Fustel de Coulanges claimed that during the Early Middle Ages, the right to revenge was outlawed, and the judicial organization of the Merovingians, seeking to constrain the sacred custom of families to resort to revenge, created a legal order that rested on sentences handed out by judges. In other words, it was not some primitive “natural state,” but rather a society that sought to govern itself through laws and courts.43 Charles de Smedt

Charles de Smedt (1833–1911), active around the turn of the century, produced a modern and courageous attempt to understand the legal customs in the medi­eval West in their context. His article, “Les origines du duel judiciaire,” focused on France. After reviewing the laws of the Germanic kingdoms regarding judicial duels or trial by combat (337–349), he posed the question of how this institution should be understood in a Christian era: The legislation we have studied may seem, at first glance, very strange, if considered from the standpoint of our current ideas. How can we explain, in particular, that the institution of judicial duel seems to coincide with the conversion of the Germanic peoples to Christianity? Is it possible to see in this the influence of Christian ideas? It is more difficult to admit that from the beginning, and throughout the Middle Ages, the Church never approved this institution and often protested against it through the doctors and bishops most distinguished for their talents and virtues, councils and popes. Indeed, this is an abnormality which is found frequently in human history, that church doctrine energetically rejected, individual bishops and superiors of the monasteries accepted in practice, and even claimed it among their powers as temporal lords and temporal interests. But, to my knowledge, the legitimacy of the duel was never proclaimed or formally accepted by any pope, council or bishop speaking as a shepherd of souls. How, again, in light of these facts, [can we] explain the coincidence of the appearance of judicial duel among the Barbarians and their entry into the Christian Church? I think nothing is easier. […] Simply consider the social conditions of the Germans before they settled in the lands of the Empire. You could say they had almost achieved the ideal of our modern anarchists, that is, a domination of the principle of personal independence of all free men.44

42  “Il faut nous garder d’attribuer à une race des coutumes qui appartiennent à la nature humaine tout entière.” Cited from Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 429.

43  Fustel de Coulanges, Recherches sur quelques problèmes, 478–83. See also Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 475–506, where he deals with fines in the Frankish era. 44  “La législation que nous venons d’étudier peut paraî�tre, au premier abord, bien étranger, si

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De Smedt explained the ideo­logical universe of the Germans from an examination of the descriptions by Tacitus. He tackles the theme of the supreme value that personal freedom had among these peoples, the limited power of the German kings, the importance of assemblies, and the power to take decisions. Under these conditions, it is understood, the exercise of justice by a public authority was more than difficult […]. It seems to me the role of judges appointed by public assemblies to administer justice in the different villages, assisted by a kind of jury formed in place, should be limited to trying to reconcile the parties to the fine and to officially state that the transaction had been properly done and accepted, and that therefore, according to received customs, the victim or his family had given up their right of revenge; but they had no authority to settle the dispute. Finally, the lack of power to compel the convicted offender through legal violence rendered this authority ineffective.45

He went on to claim that the legal procedures for settling disputes established by the Romans became diluted among the Germans due to people being armed: There was the right to private war known to all free men and which was later restricted to the territorial lords. This law certainly denoted an extremely rudimentary social state; but it cannot be said that this meant a flagrant violation of natural law. In the absence of adequate protection by a social authority, it was necessary for the security of individuals

on la considère au point de vue de nos idées actuelles. Comment s’expliquer, en particulier, que l’institution du duel judiciaire semble coï�ncider avec la conversion des peuplades germaniques au christianisme? Est-il possible d’y voir l’influence des idées chrétiennes? Il est d’autant plus difficile de l’admettre que, dès l’origines, et dans tout le cours du moyen âge, l’É� glise n’a jamais approuvé cette institution et a souvent protesté contre elle par l’organe de ses docteurs et de ses évêques les plus distingués par leurs talents et leurs vertus, de ses conciles et des ses souverains pontifes. A la vérité, par une anomalie que se constate trop souvent dans l’histoire des hommes, ce que la doctrine ecclésiastique repoussait avec énergie, les évêques particuliers et les supérieurs des monastères l’acceptaient en pratique et même le revendiquaient en leur qualité de seigneurs temporels et pour des intérêts temporels; mais jamais, que je sache, la légitimé du duel n’a été proclamée ou formellement admise par aucune pape, par aucun concile, ni même par aucun évêque parlant comme pasteur des âmes. Comment, encore un fois, en présence de ces faits, s’expliquer la coï�ncidence de l’apparition du duel judiciaire chez les barbares et de leur entrée dans l’É� glise chrétienne? J’ose croire que rien n’est plus aisé […] Il suffit pour cela de considérer les conditions sociales des Germains avant leur établissement sur les terres de l’empire. On peut dire qu’ils avaient réalisé à peu près l’idéal de nos modernes anarchistes, tellement le principe de l’indépendance personnelle de tous les hommes libres dominait parmi eux.” Cited from Charles de Smedt, “Les origines du duel judiciaire,” Études religieuses, philosophiques, historiques et littéraires 63 (1894): 327–62 at 348–49. The following year (1895), he published Charles de Smedt, Le duel judiciaire et l’Église, which was reprinted in 2010.

45  “Dans ces conditions, on le conçoit, l’exercice de la justice par une autorité publique était plus que difficile […] Il me semble donc bien que le rôle des juges nommés dans les assemblées publiques pour aller rendre la justice dans les différents bourgs, avec l’assistance d’une espèce de jury pris sur place, devait se borner à tàcher d’amener les parties à composition et à constater officiellement que la transaction avait été dûment faite et acceptée, et que, par conséquent, d’après les mœurs reçues, l’offensé ou sa famille avaient renoncé à leur droit de vengeance; mais il n’avait pas d’autorité pour trancher lui-même le litige; du reste, le manque de pouvoir pour contraindre par la violence légale le prévenu reconnu coupable aurait cette autorité tout à fait inefficace.” Cited from De Smedt, “Les origines du duel,” 350–51.

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to allow them to apply justice for themselves with the help of those who were linked to them by blood ties or friendship.46

According to De Smedt, the German leaders were clearly primitive in questions of law: Rough and coarse, knowing little more than the profession of arms, they and their fellow expeditionaries, who formed a sort of court and counsel and were nominated to fulfil public offices, were unable to navigate the maze of a thousand difficult questions of law to be resolved and the procedural formalities to be followed in the administration of justice, and had only an imperfectly organized police.47

So, duelling was consistent with a primitive society in a process of evolution:

The duel, thus authorized and even required by law, will always seem to us today as a barbaric institution. And yet, if one takes into account the state of society and the spirit of the time and the environment in which it was established, there is nothing paradoxical; to me it seems to affirm that it was a step forward on the road to civilization. It certainly brought changes to the pre-existing condition that may be regarded as progress. It certainly would have been desirable if this first step had been followed quickly by other larger and more decisive ones […]. We must admit that progress was very slow in this regard throughout the Middle Ages.48

De Smedt states that this reality was typical of human institutions, just as in his time society called for an international tribunal that would judge disputes between states. He demands that the difficult circumstances of the present should not contaminate the historical judgement and the appreciation of the ancient Germans, “our ancestors,” “whose spirit had barely opened to the first light of civilization, and whose heart knew no stronger and more rooted passion than that of personal independence.”49 Then, he 46  “C’était le droit de guerre privée reconnu à tous les hommes libres et qui fut réservé plus tard aux seigneurs territoriaux. Ce droit dénote assurément un état social extrêmement rudimentaire; mais on ne peut pas dire qu’il y ait là une violation manifeste du droit naturel. En l’absence d’une protection suffisante par une autorité sociale, il faut bien permettre aux individus de pouvoir à leur sécurité en se faisant justice à eux-mêmes avec le concours de ceux qui leur sont unis par les liens du sang ou de l’amitié.” Cited from De Smedt, “Les origines du duel,” 351–52.

47  “Rudes et grossiers, ne connaissant guère que le métier des armes, ni eux ni les compagnons de leurs expéditions, qui leur formaient une sorte de cour et de conseil et qui étaient naturellement désignés pour remplir les fonctions publiques, n’étaient capables de s’orienter dans le dédale des mille questions délicates de droit à résoudre et des formalités de procédure à suivre dans l’administration de la justice, et ils ne disposaient que d’une police bien imparfaitement organisée.” Cited from De Smedt, “Les origines du duel,” 352.

48  “Le duel, ainsi autorisé et même prescrit par la loi, nous apparaî�t toujours maintenant comme une institution bien barbare. Et pourtant, si l’on tient compte de l’état de la société et des esprits au temps et dans le milieu où elle fut établie, il n’y a rien de paradoxal, me semble-t-il, à affirmer qu’elle fut un pas en avant dans la voie de la civilisation. Elle apportait certainement à l’état préexistant des modifications qui peuvent être regardées comme des progrès […] Il faut avouer que le progrès a été bien lent à cet égard dans tout le cours du moyen âge.” Cited from De Smedt, “Les origines du duel,” 354–55.

49  “Dont l’esprit s’ouvrait à peine aux premières lueurs de la civilisation, et dont le cœur ne connaissait pas de passion plus forte et plus enracinée que celle de l’indépendance personnelle.” Cited from De Smedt, “Les origines du duel,” 356.

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attempted to elucidate the difficult problem of knowing if the legislation he had studied was in fact applied. People who wrote in those times, he complains, were not concerned about the majority of the population, but rather a few nobles. Regrettably, they have left little documentation in which we can observe the everyday life of society. In a similar spirit he went on to contextualize the duel as a way to explain it: […] let’s not be too quick to be shocked without looking back to when they occurred. The bishops and abbots were not only spiritual pastors of those under their leadership; they were often temporal lords of the area where the church or monastery was located.50

To be accurate, they were not actual owners, but “usufructuaries” or administrators of church goods. Gustave Ducoudray

Right at the start of the twentieth century, while studying the origins of the Parlement of Paris and justice in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—one would almost have to say a panegyric of the institution—another Frenchman, Gustave Ducoudray (1838–1906), added his views on the Middle Ages. Imbued with the ideas of his times, Ducoudray shows disdain for almost the entire French medi­eval past, stating that feudal society rested on usurpation, violence, servitude, and not on principles. Feudal law did not exist, he argued, as primitive feudality was the negation of law.51 In his view, the “humeur belliqueuse de la noblesse,” in other words, the primitivism of feudal assemblies, could only be stopped when an exceptional figure appeared on the political stage in France: a king, what’s more a saint, who managed to impose dominion over all the population and procure civilized justice. After abandoning “disorder,” an intensely desired sense of justice began to awaken.52 And to eradicate the everyday experience of corruption among royal officials who had allowed all kinds of abuse, the monarchy used both arms and laws to subjugate the greater and lesser feudal lords.53 50  “Ne soyons pas trop prompts à nous en scandaliser, sans nous reporter à l’époque où ils se produisent. Les évêques et les abbés n’étaient pas seulement les pasteurs spirituels des âmes placées sous leur houlette; ils étaient de plus, très souvent, seigneurs temporels du pays où était située l’église ou le monastère.” Cited from De Smedt, “Les origines du duel,” 361. 51  “Il n’y a pas de droit féodal parce que la féodalité primitive était la négation du droit.” Cited from Gustave Ducoudray, Les origines du Parlement de Paris et la Justice aux xiiie et xive siècles (Paris, 1902), 773.

52  “This evolution of the feudal parliaments was mainly due to progress in France of the order that marked the thirteenth century, the action of a strong monarchy, a sentiment already awakened of justice, the first concern of a king who was a saint, Louis IX” (Cette évolution des Parlements féodaux fut principalement due en France aux progress de l’ordre qui marquent le XIIIe siècle, à l’action d’une royauté forte, à une sentiment déjà très éveillé de la justice, première préoccupation d’un roi qui fut un saint, Louis IX). Cited from Ducoudray, Les origines du Parlement, 28. Further on, when he deals with the development of legal studies in the universities, he states “the revival of legal studies attested the deep sense of justice, the first need of a society hardly out of barbarity” (Le réveil des études juridiques attestait le profond sentiment de la justice, premier besoin d’une société à peine sortie de la barbarie). Cited from Ducoudray, Les origines du Parlement, 39. 53  “With arms and laws, royalty reduced the large and small feudal kingdoms. […] bad faith was

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Although his study material was not the Early Middle Ages, Ducoudray ignored law that was not found in the registers of the parliament. He devoted barely eight pages to Germanic, canon, Roman, natural law, and equity judgements. HIs images of feudalism reveal a disdain for a barbarous epoch; and here he discusses revenge: Coercion is the first impulse of the pride of man, and it is also the instinct for revenge over which he has the most difficulty in triumphing. Hence, among primitive nations, the solidarity of the family and the tribe; then, in the Middle Ages, feudal groupings. As sovereign entities, wars were family-based and local. Relatives of the men, as once did the Germanic tribes, joined in the hatred of their leaders or people close to them. It was always the Germanic fehde, which became in Old French, faida. It is still the primitive association of a family reacting, and the only way of responding in the absence of a public power that was not sufficiently established. Revenge, then, was the law, and war the law […].54

Conclusion I believe I have shown that the negative vision of the Middle Ages, taking the existence of a right to revenge as a prism, formed at the end of the early-modern era from contamination of the appreciation of the medi­eval past by enlightened ideas. Wrapped in revolutionary ideals, the French Enlightenment saw medi­eval society plunged into a “natural state,” the result of the introduction of the Germanic traditions into Western Europe. Nor was nineteenth-century legal history, taking the Roman legal system as its paradigm, capable of understanding the peculiar organization of medi­eval society, lacking as it did a unifying political power. The paradigm which asserts that the rule of law did not exist during the Middle Ages has had important consequences in the history of justice and conflict resolution. French twentieth-century historio­graphy up to 1950 only focused on the period after the twelfth century, given that was when the idea arose that crime not only harmed the individual, but also the community and the state. However, from the nineteenth century onwards, it became possible to undertake legal history focused on three fields: judicial so common, security precarious with royal officials such as those we have portrayed, as sales gave rise to a host of abuses” (Par les armes et par les lois, la royauté diminua les grandes et les petites royautés féodales [...] la mauvaise foi était si habituelle, la sécurité si précaire avec des officiers royaux comme ceux que nous avons dépeints, que les vente donnaient lieu à une foule d’abu). Cited from Ducoudray, Les origines du Parlement, pp. 30, 861–62. See the sharp comments by Félix Aubert “Gustave Ducoudray. Les Origines du Parlement de Paris et la justice aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” Bibliothèque de l’École de chartes 64 (1903): 355–60.

54  “Le premier sujet d’orgueil de l’homme, c’est sa force, et c’est l’instinct de la vengeance dont il a le plus de peine à triompher. De là, chez les nations primitives, la solidarité de la famille et de la tribu; de là, au moyen âge, les groupements féodaux. Comme les souverainetés, les guerres étaient familiales et locales. Les parents des seigneurs entraient, comme autrefois les tribus germaniques, dans les haines de leur chef ou d’un de leurs proches. C’est toujours la fehde germanique, devenue, dans le vieux langage français, la faide. C’est toujours la primitive association de la famille agissant et seule capable d’agir en l’absence d’un pouvoir public qui n’est suffisamment constitué. La vengeance alors c’est le droit, la guerre, la loi […].” Cited from Ducoudray, Les origines du Parlement, 325–26.

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institutions, judicial procedures, and the birth of law with editions of laws and their commentaries. In the second half of the twentieth century, in a search for an understanding of the legal “order” of the Middle Ages, historio­graphy of medi­eval justice has left the judicial institutions to one side and concentrated on society’s methods for resolving conflicts. With this approach it is clear that a judicial route was but one among various options, one that didn’t conflict with the other two: peace, and war or revenge. But taking this aspect further is beyond the scope of this article.

Chapter 17

SPOLIA AND MEMORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENICE MYRIAM PILUTTI NAMER

This chapter represents preliminary research into a little recognized topic that is fundamental for the history of the city of Venice. During the nineteenth century Venice underwent changes that transformed it from a historic city to a tourist city. Commentators have always been interested in Venetian changes but have paid little or no attention to the process of revision of the medi­eval origins of the city by intellectuals and building experts. This century-long process involved and cut across all levels of Venetian society, to the extent that it is difficult to pinpoint without getting lost in prosopo­graphies and isolated events. But the revision and recovery of the past left its mark on the city and rendered it the Venice we know today, characterized by ongoing changes. For the sake of brevity, I will only outline a few exemplary, though not exhaustive, guidelines for the interpretation of a larger phenomenon, to be discussed elsewhere. A City under Construction

The events taking place in Venice in the long nineteenth century are diverse and complex. Urban and architectural changes are mostly known thanks to Giandomenico Romanelli’s research.1 Unfortunately, we still do not have a full overview of all the cultural elements that would enable a full understanding of this period. As with other Italian cities, Venice fell under successive political entities, from the Napoleonic through the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866, and had to interact with all of them. Let us recall the key dates: the Austrians acquired Venice in 1797 and ruled until 1806; from then until 1814 Venice was under French rule; the city was then annexed to the Austrian Empire and remained part of it until 1866, with a small break in 1848–1849 with the Revolution led by Daniele Manin. Finally, in 1866, Venice became Italian. For this whole century Venice was under construction. The Napoleonic repression brought about a very significant reduction in and dispersal of monuments and works of art in the city. But this led to the need for constant works

*  This chapter, based on my paper at the meeting held in Lleida in 2011, established some of the main points which were then developed in Myriam Pilutti Namer, Spolia e imitazioni a Venezia nell’Ottocento. Il Fondaco dei Turchi tra archeo­logia e cultura del restauro (Venice, 2016).

1  Giandomenico Romanelli, Venezia Ottocento (Venice, 1977).

Myriam Pilutti Namer ([email protected]) is Adjunct Lecturer in History of the Arts at the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice.

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to rehabilitate and restore the city to a usable condition.2 Such restoration works were carried out on buildings considered most important from the perspective of cultural history, but also on private buildings on the personal initiative of some significant figures of the cultural life of that period.3 This phenomenon was not limited to the small lagoon city; it occurred all over Italy and Europe, but it was particularly significant for Venice.4 This process led the citizens to reflect upon the past of the city, especially its medi­eval origins and the unicum of its artistic identity. Accordingly, neoclassical architecture lost its appeal, whereas medi­eval art generated fresh interest. This attitude, which can be found in analogous European currents, was peculiar in Venice and was tightly intertwined with the painful recovery of its identity as the capital city of an empire. There were three symbolic buildings in this period: the Basilica di San Marco, the Fondaco dei Turchi, and the Campanile (bell tower) di San Marco. These three buildings were a century-long focus for the idealistic and ideo­logical restoration of Venetian grandeur. The history of the basilica is approximately known, but, again, no comprehensive study of its changes during the nineteenth century exists, a fundamental period for European culture. Let me mention a few key elements. The restoration began in the 1830s under the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was then interrupted in the 1870s, by which time Venice was part of the Kingdom of Italy. The restoration was carried out in its entirety by the old Giambattista Meduna. He managed to plan and complete the restoration of the northern and southern façades before works were interrupted in 1877 due to the publication of the pamphlet Osservazioni intorno ai restauri interni ed esterni della basilica di San Marco by Alvise Piero Zorzi, with a preface by John Ruskin. At that stage, Meduna was about to start the restoration of the western façade, the one overlooking the square.5 This break was an event which left a profound mark on Venetian culture and signified the end of a whole generation of technicians. Giambattista Meduna, the most famous architect in the city, restorer of La Fenice Theatre and advocate of neo-Gothic style, was now isolated, while friends and disciples of Camillo Boito were coming to the fore.6 Indeed, the famous architect, who studied in Venice but spent many years working in Milan, gathered them under his supervision to cooperate on the first complete study of the Basilica di San Marco. The study was published by Ferdinando Ongania between 1881 and 1893, a work which embraces and embodies the whole period.7 2  Romanelli, Venezia Ottocento.

3  For an overview, see Gianfranco Pertot, Venezia restaurata: centosettanta anni di interventi di restauro sugli edifici veneziani (Milan, 1988).

4  Among the numerous studies on the subject and with reference to Venice, let me just cite Luciano Patetta, L’architettura dell’eclettismo: fonti, teorie, modelli 1750–1900 (Milan, 1975); and Guido Zucconi, L’invenzione del passato: Camillo Boito e l’architettura neomedi­evale 1855–1890 (Venice, 1997). 5  Mario Dalla Costa, La basilica di San Marco e i restauri dell’Ottocento: le idee di E. Viollet-leDuc, J. Ruskin e le ‘Osservazioni’ di A. P. Zorzi (Venice, 1983). 6  Zucconi, L’invenzione del passato.

7  Camilo Boito, ed., La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia illustrata nella storia e nell’arte da scrittori veneziani (Venice, 1881–1893). See also Italo Zannier and Paolo Costantini, Venezia nella



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In the meantime, another building became the centre of the controversy surrounding different methodo­logical and cultural approaches: the Fondaco dei Turchi. The Fondaco was originally a private building in the thirteenth century and was linked to the extensive socio-cultural changes which took place after the Fourth Crusade and the founding of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. In 1621 it was given to the Municipality of Venice and used as a warehouse for Turkish merchants (the name fondaco refers to this use). In 1821 it was sold to a private citizen, Antonio Busetto, who wanted to tear it down. At this very time the Austrian Empire and the Municipality of Venice were struggling over its future. Unlike the Austrians, the Venetians did not want the building to be destroyed. This led to a dispute which only ended in 1860, when the mono­graph by Agostino Sagredo and Federico Berchet was published in Milan (not in Venice, because of censorship). After that, the Austrians themselves prohibited the demolition of the building and partly funded its restoration, carried out by Federico Berchet from 1861 to 1869 and continued, with respect to the interior, until 1878.8 In that year a Civic Museum was opened. It was intended to house the collection of the intellectual, Teodoro Correr, which had hitherto been exhibited in his house in San Giacomo de l’Orio. However, the collection did not remain there for long. In 1922, on the initiative of Pompeo Molmenti, it was moved to the Procuratie in San Marco, where it is still visible. The Fondaco, on the other hand, housed a mineral collection, which can still be visited today.9 The last symbol marking the city under ongoing construction is the Campanile di San Marco, the changes to which closed a complicated century and opened another one characterized by even more terrible shocks, the twentieth century. The bell tower, showing visible signs of instability, collapsed on July 8, 1902. The episode caused dismay and concern at an international level and ended with the building being rebuilt identically, “as it was, where it was.”10 I will return to this event later.

fotografia dell’Ottocento (Venice, 1986). For further information on Ferdinando Ongania, see Mariachiara Mazzariol, Ferdinando Ongania editore a San Marco (Venice, 2008). For information on the episode, see Irene Favaretto, Ferdinando Ongania editore e la basilica di San Marco (Venice, 2010); Irene Favaretto and Maria Da Villa Urbani, Ferdinando Ongania. La Basilica di San Marco 1881–1893 (Venice, 2011).

8  For a summary of the episode, see Agostino Sagredo and Federico Berchet, Il Fondaco dei Turchi in Venezia: studi storici e artistici (Milan, 1860); C. Ferro, “Appunti da un cantiere dell’Ottocento,” Recuperare 12 (1993): 650–59; Juergen Schulz, The New Palaces of Medi­eval Venice (Uni­ver­sity Park, 2004), and previous writings. 9  Sergio Barizza, “Le sedi del museo: da casa Correr, al Fontego dei Turchi, alle Procuratie,” in Una città e il suo museo: un secolo e mezzo di collezioni civiche veneziane, ed. Giandomenico Romanelli (Venice, 1988), 291–98. 10  In the words of Pompeo Gherardo Molmenti. For information on the bell tower, see Sergio Barizza, ed., Il Campanile di San Marco: il crollo e la ricostruzione (Cinisello Balsamo, 1992), and previous writings.

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Public Monuments

Commemorative monuments represent an important group of structures that allow us to reconstruct the cultural fabric of the period. Most were commissioned by the state. Moreover, the projects were often conceived within the Academy of Fine Arts. The events surrounding the monument to Titian in the middle of the nineteenth century are fairly well known.11 The re-evaluation of well-known artists of the Renaissance had become possible thanks to eulogies read at the Academy during competitions among disciples. This was happening around the middle of the century thanks to large public commissions. During the same period the project of the Venetian pantheon in the Doge’s Palace at the behest of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti was also conceived. The pantheon shows a cross-section of local celebrities to commemorate the splendours of the Republic.12 The harbingers of the rehabilitation process of past artistic figures, together with the growing patriotic desire for freedom from Austrian rule, are noted especially in the famous I monumenti più antichi di Venezia, edited by Leopoldo Cicognara with the cooperation of Antonio Diedo and Giannantonio Selva. It was published in 1815 together with Le Fabbriche più cospicue di Venezia in two volumes and reissued with supplements in 1858. These books contain detailed descriptions and accurate drawings of all commemorative and funerary monuments linked to outstanding individuals of the Venetian Republic.

Marble Deposits and Restoration Works

Napoleon’s lootings and, more generally, the long process of reorganizing the city, as well as the reconstruction of areas with collapsed or ruined buildings, led to the accumulation of ancient material remains.13 Presumably, much of this material entered the antique market and was sold alongside a staggering number of fakes.14 On the other hand, some ended up in municipal warehouses or in the workshops of stonemasons, who used “ancient” materials (anything from the past, with no distinction) for the restoration of architecture. In this regard, the documents about the above-mentioned restoration of the Fondaco dei Turchi are indicative, in particular, from Giornale VI: […] demonstrating the various qualities of Oriental and Greek marbles with historic facia, panels, and patera worked and decorated with symbolic animals purchased on more

11  Francesco Beltrame, Sul monumento a Tiziano: cenni illustrativi a cura di Pietro Naratovich (Venice, 1852); Lionello Puppi, “Dalle esequie immaginarie del Ridolfi al monumento funerario ai Frari,” in Tiziano: l’ultimo atto, ed. Lionello Puppi (Milan, 2007), 233–36. 12  Fabrizio Magani, Il “Panteon Veneto” (Venice, 1997).

13  Buildings were sometimes demolished by their impoverished owners: “Li disgraziati proprietari non ebbero alcun altro partito, che di demolire le loro case per venderne li materiali a prezzo più infimo,” from the Priuli-Dubois report of 1830. Cited from Romanelli, Venezia Ottocento, 144–45. 14  Massimo Ferretti, “Falsi e tradizione artistica,” in Storia dell’arte italiana, ed. Federico Zeri, 4 vols. (Turin, 1981), 3:115–95; see also Alberto Rizzi, Scultura esterna a Venezia (Venice, 1987).



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than one occasion for a small sum from Venice city council as well as marble rear sections, pieces worked in Istria stone from St. Croce in Trieste, Stilari and Rosso di Verona received from stonemason Spiera Giacomo for decoration work on the lateral towers with curbing and central facade of the Fondaco dei Turchi.15

This excerpt shows that the materials, coming from different places, were recovered by Federico Berchet and bought from the Municipality of Venice. For example, on February 1, 1865, Giuseppe al Malcantone, “parish priest” (il signor parroco), sold “29 pieces of Byzantine fassa said 0.23 wide” (29 pezzi di fassa bisantina detta larga 0.23) but also “1 large patera, 3 said smaller, 5 pieces of Croce said wide, 1 named Rosettone” (1 patera grande, 3 dette minori, 5 pezzi Croce detta larga 0.13, 1 detto Rosettone). The material was transported by boat (toppo a due remi) and charged to the expense account. On February 4, “two painted pateras” (due patere dipinte) came from the Donà Palace in San Stin. On February 12, the “doctor called” (medico cosidetto) di Meolo gave “ancient marble pateras decorated with symbolic figures” (patere antiche di marmo con figure simboliche). On February 24 the friars of San Francesco della Vigna provided “5 Greek marble formelle decorated with symbolic figures, 5 marble pateras decorated with symbolic animals” (5 Formelle di marmo greco con figure simboliche, 5 Patere con animali simbolici di marmo), one of which was “a big one” (una grande), and other pieces. On March 14, Sig. Domenico Dr. Fadiga, presumably related to the famous but infamous entrepreneur who worked on the restoration of San Marco, cited by Alvise Piero Zorzi in his Osservazioni, gave marmi in sorte, and so on. These examples seem to demonstrate the difficulty of finding material. But they also allow us to verify and quantify the materials circulating in the market at that time, as will be explained later.

The Stonemasons’ Workshops

Giandomenico Romanelli wrote in his Venezia Ottocento that there were probably more than six hundred stonemasons in Venice in the nineteenth century. As Romanelli mentioned, very little is known about these stonemasons, with the exception of the names of some artists and famous entrepreneurs.16 Antonio Canova, the foremost European exponent of Neoclassicism, died in 1822 and the Academy of Fine Arts trained numerous stonemasons, who either were already working in the workshop, or would work there once they finished their studies. In particular, ornamentalists were engaged in restoration works. For example, eighteen ornamentalists worked on the northern façade of the Basilica di San Marco for the entrepreneur Vincenzo Fadiga, and as many cooperated with Giacomo Spiera for the entrepreneur Sebastiano Cadel. Some names can be found in the documents of the Fondaco dei Turchi and, again, in the Giornale VI, and this gives 15  “Dimostrante le varie qualità di marmi orientali e greco con fascie, Formelle e Patere antiche lavorate ad ornati di animali simbolici in più volte acquistati in via economica dal Comune di Venezia, nonché i posteriori marmi, pezzi lavorati in pietra d’Istria, di S. Croce di Trieste, stilari e rosso di Verona ricevuti dallo Scarpellino scultore Spiera Giacomo pel lavoro di decorazione delle laterali Torrette con voltatesta e Facciata centrale del Fondaco dei Turchi.” From Venice, Archivio Storico Municipale del Comune di Venezia, Atti di Ufficio, IX–7–26, Giornale VI. 16  Romanelli, Venezia Ottocento, 441.

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an idea of how many people were generally engaged in restoration works. We know of nineteen “workers at work on the towers” (operai al lavoro sulle torrette) for the Cadel,17 and thirteen ornamentalists working for Giacomo Spiera’s enterprise.18 These stonemasons knew how to produce new materials according to different styles from the past, but also how to restore ancient materials in the style of the original. In short, in the nineteenth century they produced new materials from old ones found in the above-mentioned warehouses. It was not a new phenomenon in nineteenth-century European culture, but one of fundamental importance for Venice. It changed the design of the city so much that today it is difficult to recognize the materials by simply looking at the buildings. Dating them becomes even more difficult.

Publications and Resources

Lessons given at the Academy of Fine Arts played an important role in acquiring the styles of the past in Venice. One of the Academy masters was Giuseppe Borsato, a famous ornamentalist in demand as an interior designer for private buildings. He wrote the Repertorio ornamentale, published in Milan in 1831. It is important because it contains part of his interior design drawings. Some little-known educational tools were also available to Academy students. I shall cite some of those written in Venice: the Compendio delle più interessanti regole di architettura teorico-pratiche ricavate dai migliori autori per uso ed istruzione dei giovani che si dedicano a questo studio del professore architetto Francesco Lazzari, published in Venice in 1830,19 and the precious and ambitious Enciclopedia artistica composed in 1864 by Lodovico Cadorin,20 who had previously written Studi teorici e pratici di architettura e di ornato (Venice, 1860).21 The encyclopaedia was conceived as: Original Italian work which comprises one hundred plates of different styles and models for the arts and crafts required for all artists in general and especially architects, sil-

17  “Capomuratore: Stilletto Antonio; Muratori: Stiletto Lorenzo, Miotti Luigi, Piazza Filippo, Antinori Antonio, Svatoar (?) Osvaldo, Pianoa Angelo, De Marchi Lorenzo. Capo Marianga: Sanzuane Antonio. Manovale: Bastianello Valentino, Carlon Angelo, Sensat Daniele, Fratta Angelo. Capo Tagliapietra: Zanolin Natale. Tagliapietra: Poggio Francesco, Cheè Giobatta, Marella Giuseppe d. Babaci; Muriotto Domenico; Rogo Gaspare.” From Venice, Archivio Storico Municipale del Comune di Venezia, Atti di Ufficio, IX–7–26, Giornale VI.

18  “Dirett. Tagliap. Sorazza Fortunato; Capo Tagliap. Pellegrini Giulio; Capo detto Seattolo Nicolò; Tagliapietra: Massini Giovanni, Zanchetta Pietro, Penso Gaetano, Piasento Alessandro, Pezzotti Eugenio, Masaro Gesuè, Palafacchina Gabriele; Garzon Panziera Lorenzo; Lustratore Vittore Pietro; Segato Miotto Lorenzo.” From Venice, Archivio Storico Municipale del Comune di Venezia, Atti di Ufficio, IX–7–26, Giornale VI.

19  Francesco Lazzari, Compendio delle più interessanti regole di architettura teorico-pratiche ricavate dai migliori autori per uso ed istruzione dei giovani che si dedicano a questo studio del professore architetto Francesco Lazzari (Venice, 1830).

20  Ludovico Cadorin, Nuova enciclopedia artística ovvero collezioni di disegni originali (Venice, 1864). 21  Ludovico Cadorin, Studi teorici e pratici di architettura e di ornato (Venice, 1860).



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versmiths, armourers, bricklayers, master masons, blacksmiths in general, carpenters, window makers, casters, engineers, engravers, goldsmiths, painters, decorators, restorers, stone masons, set markers, plasterers, stone cutters, upholsterers, turners, etc., etc.22

Major European texts were also translated. In 1857 in Milan Arborio Mella published his Elementi di architettura gotica, but four years earlier in 1853 Francesco Lazzari had already translated I Principi dello stile gotico by Friedrich Hoffstadt from the French. In the final pages he writes about Venice, denying the “purity” of its Gothic style: Whilst there are fewer fine Gothic buildings in Italy than in countries on the other side of the Alps, Milan cathedral is one of the most excellent models of the pointed arch and attracts the transfixed admiration of all. The same cannot be said of Venice but there are, however, several significant buildings here which, while not representing Gothic at its peak, testify to eras which are not far off. The churches of Santa Maria de’Frari, Santi Gio e Paolo, Santa Maria dell’Orto, etc. And the Foscari, Pisani, Giovannelli palaces and many others are examples of this with their vaguely interwoven façade archives and this is even more the case of the magnificent Palazzo Ducale whose dignified volume dominates all the buildings which frame it.23

As we have noted, Lorenzo Urbani too translated some texts from French. In particular, he translated the Raccolta de’ migliori ornamenti del Medio Evo e profili di architettura bizantina disegnati e descritti Dal Cav. Carlo Heideloff,24 an extremely interesting collection of examples from medi­eval architecture, mainly from Germany.25 The dissemination of an early Italian translation of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice was influential for the history of European culture. The translation was presumably published in the 1850s, whereas, the first edition of the book, written by Ruskin in phases during the 1840s, was published in 1855 in England and in 1910 in Italy. As Guido Zucconi discussed, the English scholar had presumably some kind of interaction with Venetian

22  “Opera Originale Italiana che comprende cento tavole di differenti stili e modelli per le arti e pei mestieri necessaria a tutti gli artisti in genere e particolarmente ad architetti, argentieri, armaiuoli, capimastri muratori, carpentieri, fabbri in generale, falegnami, finestraj, fonditori, ingegneri, intagliatori, orefici, pittori, decoratori, rimessai, scalpellini, scenografi, stuccatori, tagliapietra, tappezzieri, tornitori ec. ec.” Cited from cover of Ludovico Cadorin, Nuova Enciclopedia artistica (Venice, 1864).

23  “Sebbene l’Italia non presenti, in generale, nelle sue fabbriche lo stile gotico così� perfetto come nelle regioni oltramontane, ciò non ostante la cattedrale di Milano, uno de’ più eccellenti modelli dello stile acuto, attira gli sguardi e l’ammirazione di tutti. Venezia non può offrire altrettanto, ma però conta alcuni ragguardevoli edifizii, i quali, se non presentano lo stile gotico nel più bel meriggio, segnano epoche non a quello tanto discoste. Tali sono i templi di santa Maria de’ Frari, de’ Santi Gio. e Paolo, di santa Maria dell’Orto, ecc., tali sono i palazzi Foscari, Pisani, Giovannelli e molti ancora, le cui facciate hanno archivi vagamente intrecciati, e specialmente quelle veramente magnifiche di Palazzo ducale che sovrasta per la dignitosa sua mole tutte le fabbriche che gli fanno corteo.” Cited from Friedrich Hoffstadt I principi dello stile gotico cavati dei monumenti del medioevo ad uso degli artisti ed operai, trans. Francesco Lazzari (Venice, 1853), 159.

24  Lorenzo Urbani, Raccolta de’ migliori ornamenti del Medio Evo e profili di architettura bizantina disegnati e descritti Dal Cav. Carlo Heideloff (Venice, 1859). 25  Karl Heideloff, Les ornaments du Moyen Age / Die Ornamentik des Mittelalters (Nuremberg, 1843); for information on Lorenzo Urbani, a Venetian architect and translator, see Giandomenico Romanelli, “Lorenzo Urbani, architetto veneziano,” Antichità viva 13 (1974): 31–47.

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intellectuals, but not much information is available. However, even a superficial reading is enough to show that the relations between The Stones of Venice and Sull’architettura e sulla scultura in Italia by Pietro Selvatico26 are strong and deserve further investigation.27 Zorzi, to name just one, seemed to know the writings of Ruskin very well. As a matter of fact, in his Osservazioni he complained about the absence of an Italian translation of Ruskin’s works: I have dedicated my book to a European celebrity, John Ruskin, who has written so much on the subject of Venice but whose work is not very well known here as a result of the fact that whilst translators are easily found for nonsensical, pseudo-historical novels such as Cooper’s The Bravo, the thousands of worthless Northern European books which spoil the taste of Italian youth and give the ignorant a bad idea of their historic homeland, these cannot be found for work which illustrates and expands our knowledge of that political, warlike, literary and artistic glory which now shines so brightly, like a college theme, which get hearts racing with joy and will be emulated by wiser and more virile future generations.28

Zorzi’s words confirm what Luciano Patetta had already emphasized some years ago: Venice was at the head of reception of texts thanks to the high cultural level of its intellectuals and the widespread knowledge of languages.29

Intellectuals and the Debate on the Preservation of Old Buildings

The most widespread feeling among nineteenth-century intellectuals was a sense of loss of its past grandeur. In general, Venice, as other Italian and European cities, saw the blossoming of studies essentially dealing, first, with the history of arts; second, with the history of origins; and, thirdly, with pamphlets on the preservation of old buildings. The studies on the history of arts and the origins of Venice have been widely used, but they have never been considered a separate cultural production: I believe they are deserving of further study. Similarly, the pamphlets on the preservation of old buildings have not been exhaustively researched, but the main lines of development are fairly clear. There is a significant mid-century gap during the period after Manin’s Republic and, in particular, after Venice’s annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. Indeed, as time went by, problematic changes in the city increased. I will provide some famous examples. 26  Pietro Selvatico, Sull’architettura e sulla scultura in Italia (Venice, 1847). 27  Zucconi, L’invenzione del passato, 47–94.

28  “Ho dedicato il mio libro ad una celebrità europea, John Ruskin, che tanto scrisse e scrive intorno a Venezia, le di cui opere non sono qui troppo conosciute, per la ragione, che trovasi facilmente un traduttore per le buffonate romanzesche, pseudoistoriche, come il Bravo di Venezia di Cooper, per le migliaia di libercoli oltramontani, che guastano il buon gusto della gioventù italiana, e donano agli ignari una cattiva idea della loro patria antica; ma non per le opere che la illustrano, ed esplicano maggiormente quella gloria politica, bellicosa, letteraria, ed artistica, a cui ora s’irride, come ad un tema da collegio, che farà battere il cuore di gioja, ed accenderà la emulazione di posteri più virili e più sapienti.” Cited from Alvise Piero Zorzi, “Osservazioni,” in La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia illustrata nella storia e nell’arte da scrittori veneziani, ed. Camilo Boito (Venice, 1881–1893), 45. 29  Patetta, Architettura dell’eclettismo, 295.



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In the 1870s, Viollet-le-Duc praised the restoration of the Basilica di San Marco (1872),30 whereas Zorzi wrote in the aforementioned Osservazioni (1877): If I publish these observations on restoration work on the Basilica di San Marco, it should not be believed that I do so out of a desire to speak ill of new work in the modern era or out of archaeo­logical or painterly fanaticism preferring ruins to restored buildings. I have rather been prompted by the love which every modestly cultured person should feel for the historical and artistic heritage of his nation, a heritage which is continually being defaced on the excuse of saving it for generations to come.31

Ruskin, who funded the pamphlet, added in the presentation letter:

My dear friend! I have no words in our rough English, nor can I express the gratitude my heart feels in seeing an aristocratic Venetian finally stand up to defend the beauties of his native city and the divinity of its monuments from the ruin hanging over them by the restoration work already begun in any language less passionate than that of Dante.32

The Fondaco dei Turchi is another famous example. The designer Federico Berchet stood up for his work and the restoration was defended by newspapers.33 But in 1887 in an accusatory pamphlet, symbolically entitled Venezia imbellettata, the young Giacomo Boni harshly commented: “Restoration work on the Fondaco began in around 1860 and was so thoroughly accomplished that no hope remains of finding even the slightest element which can confidently be identified as testament to the historic palazzo.”34 The last and most symbolic event was the collapse of the San Marco bell tower. It occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century and was widely studied, but surprisingly not in detail. The bell tower collapsed in July 1902 after numerous events that presaged the accident. As a result of the clampdown, Giacomo Boni, already responsible for the excavations of the Roman Forum, was chosen as supervisor of the reconstruction works. A parliamentary inquiry gave Pompeo Gherardo Molmenti, a young Venetian 30  Dalla Costa, La Basilica di San Marco.

31  “Se pubblico codeste osservazioni sopra i ristauri della Basilica di San Marco, non si pensi lo faccia per una mania di sparlare contro quanto si opera di nuovo nell’epoca attuale, o per un fanatismo archeo­logico e pittorico, che ama le rovine meglio dei ristauri. Quanto scrissi mi fu suggerito dall’amore, che deve avere ogni persona, modestamente colta, alle memorie storico artistiche del proprio paese; memorie che qui si va di continuo deturpando, con la scusa di salvarle per i secoli venturi.” Cited from Zorzi, “Osservazioni,” in La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia, ed. Boito, 43. 32  “Mio caro amico! Non ho parole nel nostro ruvido inglese, ne potrei con qualsiasi altra lingua meno appassionata di quella di Dante, esprimervi la mia gratitudine, che prova il mio cuore, al vedere un Nobile Veneziano finalmente alzarsi per difendere la bellezza della sua città nativa, e la divinità de’ monumenti, dalla rovina, che loro minaccia i restauri già intrapresi.” Cited from John J. Ruskin, in “Osservazioni,” in La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia, ed. Boito, 47. 33  Sagredo and Berchet, Il Fondaco dei Turchi.

34  “Il ristauro del Fondaco cominciò attorno al 1860 e fu condotto a termine così� scrupolosamente, da non lasciar speranza di trovare una parte benché minima cui si possa guardare con confidenza come reliquia del palazzo antico.” Cited from Giacomo Boni, Venezia imbellettata (Rome, 1887), 18–19.

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intellectual, the opportunity to give a speech in the Senate perfectly summarizing the events of the nineteenth century: […] We not yet decrepit men recall a picturesque, poetic Venice suffused with beauty and mystery which has largely been destroyed not for convenience, embellishment or to serve some useful purpose but out of a craze for novelty. It was believed that there was a pressing need in Venice too for building reform to bring it into line with the needs of modern life, that Venice too should have wide roads and easier communications to revive its trading riches, that Venetians too should be able to delight in ugly modern industrial chimneys and resign themselves to hygiene prompted changes almost as if the old Venetians lived shorter and worse lives than us. In fact, reforms were enacted which are in open conflict with the character of Venice itself and the nature of art to which Venice is sacred. (Interruption) I felt a heterodox interruption. I’ll answer right away that to some extent I am inclined to agree with those who interrupted me. I too believe that whilst Venice’s stones are better and more beautiful than its men, men too have their rights and it is wrong to condemn people to live between the cold walls of a museum in the name of a love of art. But there are ways of reconciling the demands of historic art with the demands of modernity […].35

The end of the speech urged the reconstruction of the bell tower “as it was, where it was” (nella stessa forma, nello stesso luogo): With these feelings of hope we will see the new bell tower erected. Certainly it will not be our beloved bell tower […] but it will take the same form (take note, Mr. Minister, the same form) and rise up in the same place, both monument and watchtower, not simply to preserve Venice’s characteristic appearance and traditional profile but equally to communicate to both Italians and foreigners that Venice’s soul is not dead. Springing from the dust of the past, the new monument will be not simply Venetian but also Italian, testament to living and everlasting strength, to hope and good fortune for the future of the new Italy.36

35  “[…] Noi, che decrepiti non siamo, ricordiamo una Venezia pittoresca, poetica, piena di fascino e di mistero, in gran parte distrutta non per comodo, per decoro, per utile, ma per smania di novità. Si credette che anche a Venezia, si imponesse, come imprescindibile necessità, una riforma edilizia, conforme ai bisogni della vita moderna: che essa pure dovesse avere strade più ampie, comunicazioni più pronte, per ravvivare in sé la prosperità dei commerci; che anche gli occhi dei veneziani dovessero assuefarsi ai brutti fumaiuoli dell’industria moderna e rassegnarsi ai mutamenti consigliati dall’igiene, quasiché i vecchi veneziani vivessero meno e peggio di noi. Difatti furono eseguite delle riforme le quali sono in aperta guerra col carattere di Venezia e con l’arte, a cui essa è sacra. (Interruzioni) Ho sentito un’eterodossa interruzione. Risponderò subito che in qualche parte sono disposto a dar ragione a chi mi ha interrotto. Credo anch’io, che quantunque le pietre a Venezia sieno migliori e più belle degli uomini, abbiano però anche gli uomini i loro diritti, e non sia lecito, per amore dell’arte, condannare gente viva ad abitare tra le fredde pareti di un museo. Ma tra le esigenze dell’arte antica e le esigenze della modernità c’è pure un modo di conciliazione […].” Cited from Pompeo Molmenti, Il campanile di San Marco: discorso pronunciato dal deputato Pompeo Molmenti alla Camera dei Deputati nella tornata dell’8 dicembre 1902 (Venice, 1902).

36  “Con questo sentimento di speranza noi vedremo sorgere il nuovo campanile. Certo non sarà più quello che amammo […], ma nella stessa forma (badi bene, signor ministro, nella stessa forma) e nello stesso luogo la torre risorgerà, monumento e presidio, risorgerà, non solo per conservare a Venezia il suo caratteristico aspetto, il suo tradizionale profilo, ma altresì� per attestare a italiani e stranieri che l’anima di Venezia non muore, e che il nuovo monumento, balzando fuori dalla polvere

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After a century of change, untold demolitions and reconstructions, Venetians demonstrated that the great symbols of their history should now become untouchable, both as eternal testimony of the city’s past greatness and as reassurance for their present, a present which, thanks to their annexation to the Kingdom of Italy, seemed brighter but still difficult and uncertain at an economic level.

Spolia and Memory

The time has come to return to our title and pull our presentation together. We have seen how construction works carried out in the nineteenth century have defined the city as we know it today. The transformation process saw technicians (engineers and architects), workers (stonemasons and apprentices), and intellectuals, often from an elite background, contributing in practical terms and participating in discussions on how the works should be carried out. The high number of dilapidated structures in Venice increased a picturesque effect that was so dear to the Romantics. But stones were the main object of attention of those who investigated the origins of the city. Stones inspired John Ruskin with his reflections on the typo­logical patterns of architectural elements which, albeit outdated, have not yet been discredited. And so it was that ancient elements were blended with nineteenth-century items in the style of the original, as happened in the Fondaco dei Turchi, in Ca’ Loredan, Ca’ Farsetti, and Ca’ d’Oro. Moreover, as we have seen, it was commonplace to reuse material from warehouses. A quotation from Zorzi gives the idea of a common practice which began to be condemned as a result of the changes in the cultural climate of the 1870s: I had not yet finished checking the proofs for this chapter for printing when I heard news which, if it is true, is very bad indeed. I have been told that a ship is on its way to England part of whose load is marble ruins which were on the sides of the Basilica and its southern façade in particular prior to restoration […]. A customs official attempted to block the shipment but the Regia Prefettura […] in the end ordered the police to let it go through as on other occasions this had been customary and that it was a question of worthless rubble. I am sure that the restoration contracts cannot have stipulated that the rubble was to remain with the artisans. If the contrary were true, any such an article would be a grave error. Leaving stones and rocks which might have been found in the inner stonework to artisans I can understand, but I cannot grasp how external cover rubble could be left to artisans as these, if they are not suitable for work on the walls, could at least supply marble parts of use in restoring the floors. If it was worthless rubble I cannot understand why money was spent in England to get hold of it.37

del passato, sarà non soltanto veneziano, ma italiano, indice di forza viva e perenne, auspicio ed augurio all’avvenire della nuova Italia.” Cited from Molmenti, Il campanile di San Marco.

37  “Non avevo finito ancora di correggere le prove di stampa di questo capitolo, che ebbi una notizia, la quale se è vera, è molto brutta. Mi fu detto constare essersi spedito un naviglio in Inghilterra, carico, in parte, dei rottami marmorei, che già rivestivano i lati ristaurati della basilica, e specialmente il lato meridionale […]. Un impiegato doganale avrebbe voluto opporsi, ma dalla Regia Prefettura […] fu alla fine ordinato ci si rilasciasse la polizza di partenza; visto, che altre volte erasi ciò praticato in simili casi, e che si trattava di macerie di niun valore. Non credo che nei contratti di ristauro si abbia stipulato, che restassero agli imprenditori le macerie. Se fosse il contrario, questo articolo del contratto sarebbe un gran fallo. Lasciare agli imprenditori le pietre

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In short, restoration yards were associated with heaps of rubble and a more or less lawful sale of ancient materials deemed useless. In the preface to Zorzi’s book, Ruskin himself laments this phenomenon when he explains that he conducted classes in Oxford showing some marble bought in Venice: “[…] and I had the bitter experience of holding in my own hands and showing to my pupils pieces of purple and white veined alabaster larger than a square foot bought here in Venice from the restoration rubble.”38 But it is Giacomo Boni who uses the harshest words in the already-mentioned Venezia imbellettata. His book contains a short para­graph provocatively entitled Coccodrilli archeofaghi. It is no accident that it begins with a Ciceronian quote from the trial of Verres. The young intellectual attacks those who profited from the trade of the city’s disiecta membra. It is worth quoting some lengthy extracts: Large, voluminous chests en route to foreign countries have been noted at the Venice customs complete with the stamp of the local Regio Istituto di Belle Arti over which the border guards exerted no control. They contained historic sculptures, the marble edges of our pieces, coats of arms, bas-reliefs, balusters, tracery arches, capitals and column shafts. The porters swear at the great weight, the locomotives whistle and the carriages rattle off. […] But it is pointless to lament such daily pillages of Venetian art treasures if there is no law to protect these. Auro suadente, nil potest oratio, and even less can be achieved by exhorting those too unfeeling to understand and unable to see what to apply it to. On this matter, it is sad to recall the know-how gathered by these latter: names, dates and size of the objects and all the bartering termino­logy, on the subject of marbles and paintings sometimes suffused by man’s most limpid ideals. Like spiders in their holes, rag and bone men hover in their low workshops sticking strips of paper to cracks in dusty glazing, waiting for piles of rags to be brought them or an ounce of bone or rusty nails, stationer’s weights and old books. If a faithless servant sells him a brass handle, if some rascal from a good family brings him an old print, if some bricklayer offers him a disc of porphyry stripped furtively from an old house he, so as not to compromise himself, hands these on to a fellow rag and bone man on a slightly higher rung on the base rag and bone ladder. Encouraged by his earnings and persuaded that art is cosmopolitan after all, he feels called to the antiquarian vocation or rather to dealing in the commercial value of antiquities and with deal after deal he achieves riches over twenty years, buys palazzi on the Grand Canal, covers them with his name and starts thinking of the cheapest way to make a good reputation for himself. Historic sculptures can be transported and transferred from wagon to wagon and steamer to steamer. The most attractive end up in the underground warehouses of the British Museum where they can be viewed by lamplight with the manager’s permission. And in the meantime our wealthy rag and bone man buys a bas-relief for a small sum, announces that he has paid ten times the amount and donates it to the city museum. He buys a repainted copy for a thousand lire. If he can’t

e i sassi, che si ponno trovare nella muratura interna, lo capisco; ma non capisco come si potrebbe abbandonare agli imprenditori le macerie del rivestimento esterno, le quali macerie, se non sono atte a rimettersi nelle pareti, possono fornire dei pezzi marmorei valevoli al ristauro almeno del pavimento. Non capisco ancora come essendo macerie di niun valore si abbia speso dall’Inghilterra denari per comperarle.” Cited from Zorzi, “Osservazioni,” in La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia, ed. Boito, 64.

38  “[…] ed ebbi l’amara afflizione di tenere nelle mie mani e mostrare ai miei allievi dei pezzi di alabastro a vena porporina e bianca, più grandi di un piede quadrato, comprati qui a Venezia dalle macerie della restaurazione.” Cited from Ruskin, in “Osservazioni,” in La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia, ed. Boito, 50.



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sell it on he offers it to the town council or the government for just one thousand two hundred, transport included. And if he can’t he complains bitterly of the greed of the local government. He protests that he has never pressed anyone to remove a tapestry from a wall or a fresco from a ceiling or terrace, nor a cornice from a Gothic house. These have always been brought to him to sell. He lets his acolytes loose like the followers of Verres to harass families who own historic objects with offers and if they tell him that they have already been bought by a peer he declares “Look how they are despoiling Venice!”39

Boni’s harsh words masterly depict everyday scenes unfolding for the entire world to see. Restoration yards presented a good opportunity to store ancient materials. Venetians could earn money by selling these materials. Zorzi’s alarm, Ruskin’s misery, Boni’s bitterness, and the market’s prosperity all have the same origin: ancient materials, spolia, were pieces of Venetian history. They were memories, souvenirs, fragments of dreams, pieces of the illustrious and glorious past of the Venetian Republic. Packing them in big boxes to be sent abroad meant jeopardizing the collective memory day by day and secretly renouncing it. But denouncing a despicable practice, on the other hand, means giving future generations the duty to preserve and pass on historical memory. 39  “Si notano alla dogana di Venezia le grosse e grandi casse, dirette all’estero, bollate col timbro del locale Regio Istitutio di Belle Arti, e sulle quali le guardie al confine non esercitano controllo. Contengono antiche sculture, le sponde marmoree dei nostri pezzi, stemmi, bassorilievi, balaustri, archetti a traforo, capitelli o fusti di colonna. I facchini maledicono al gran peso, la locomotiva fischia, e i carri si muovono cigolando. […] Ma non basta deplorare le giornaliere spogliazioni, commesse a danno di Venezia artistica, se non v’ha una legge che la tuteli. Auro suadente, nil potest oratio, e meno possono le esortazioni su quelli che non hanno sentimento per comprenderle, né vedono un oggetto cui applicarle. È� triste ricordare, a questo proposito, le cognizioni accumulate da costoro: i nomi, le date, le dimensioni degli oggetti, e tutta la termino­logia barattiera; a proposito di marmi o di tele, dove talvolta l’uomo ha trasfuso le più limpide concezioni ideali. Il rigattiere, come un ragno nel suo buco, sta nella botteguccia bassa; incolla striscie di carta lungo le spezzature della invetriata polverosa; aspetta che gli portino un fagottino di stracci, o una libbra di ossa, o di chiodi arrugginiti; pesa, pel tabaccaio, i libri vecchi. Se una domestica infedele gli vende un pomo d’ottone; se qualche monello di buona famiglia gli porta una vecchia stampa; se qualche muratore gli offre un disco di porfido, staccato furtivamente da una vecchia casa; egli, per non compromettersi, cede questi oggetti a un confratello del mestiere che si trova un gradino meno basso nel pianoterra della rigatteria. Incoraggiato dal guadagno, persuaso che dopo tutto l’arte è cosmopolita, si sente già la vocazione di fare l’antiquario, o, per dir meglio, di speculare sul valore commerciale delle antichità; e di speculazione in speculazione arriverà dopo vent’anni all’opulenza, compererà i palazzi sul Canal Grande, li fodererà col suo nome e penserà già al modo più economico di farsi una buona reputazione. Le antiche sculture vanno trasportate e trasbordate di vagone in vagone e di piroscafo in piroscafo. Le più belle finiscono immagazzinate nei sotterranei del British Museum, dove si possono visitare, al lume dei fanali, col permesso del direttore. E intanto il rigattiere opulente acquista, per poco prezzo, un bassorilievo; fa annunziare che l’ha pagato dieci volte tanto, e lo regala al Museo cittadino. Compera una copia ridipinta, per lire mille; se non trova da venderla, l’offre al Municipio o al Governo per sole milleduecento, compreso il trasporto; e se non gli riesce, deplora amaramente l’avarizia delle pubbliche amministrazioni. Protesta di non avere mai sollecitato alcuno a staccare un arazzo da una parete o un affresco da un soffitto, né un poggiuolo, né una cornice da una casa gotica; glieli hanno sempre portati a vendere. Sguinzaglia i suoi accoliti, come i seguaci di Verre, a tormentare di offerte una famiglia che possiede un oggetto antico, e se gli vengono a dire ch’è già venduto a un compare “Ecco, esclama, come spogliano Venezia!” Cited from Boni, Venezia imbellettata, 26–28.

Chapter 18

NEO-MEDI­EVALISM AND THE ANCHORING OF NEW SPATIAL IDENTITIES: LINKING NEW REGIONAL AND URBAN IDENTITIES WITH MEDI­EVAL MEMORIES KEES TERLOUW

Although the Middle Ages are long gone, the memory of the Middle Ages is still used by academics and politicians. Some academics use their interpretation of the Middle Ages to theorize about the current social and spatial order. Initially the Middle Ages were used as the Dark Ages from which man has liberated himself. In particular, modernization theory regarded the Middle Ages as the archetype of the unchanging traditional society from which man has struggled to free himself. After the liberation from these traditional shackles human development could “take-off” and progress through the different stages of modernization.1 This linear development model of the modernization theory was popular after the Second World War, but was challenged by the current period of economic and political problems which started at the end of the twentieth century. This chapter starts by discussing some aspects of these economic and political crises which challenge the nation-state. Attention then moves to the ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein and Saskia Sassen, who use the Middle Ages to better understand the current transformations of the societal and spatial order. We then focus on how the legitimation of the political order centred on the nation-state is challenged through the undermining of national identities due to globalization and individualization. We end this chapter by discussing how new spatial identities are stabilized through positioning them between the future and the past. This shows how the memory of the Middle Ages is used to strengthen the legitimation of the political systems in these globalising and individualising times. The Current Crisis of the Nation-State in the Mirror of the Middle Ages Since the 1970s, increased global competitive pressures have eroded the centralized welfare state. Neo-liberal solutions were introduced to deregulate the economy and improve the competitiveness of companies on the world market. Decentralization of 1  Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cam­bridge, 1960). Kees Terlouw ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor in Political Geo­graphy at Utrecht Uni­ver­ sity, The Netherlands.

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political power was one instrument used to confront the challenges of globalization. The transfer of social and economic responsibilities reduced the financial and regulatory burdens on the central state. The regional level was also assumed to be better suited to provide companies with tailor-made conditions helping them to compete on the world market. New forms of relations between the different levels of government emerged. Not only the hierarchical administrative relations changed through decentralization and European integration, but also new cooperative relations of governance were formed with non-state actors. The combination of changing vertical relation and the growth of horizontal linkages constantly create new political spaces and unsettled novel forms of statehood. New regional organizations constantly emerge and their membership, territory, and aims frequently change.2 To better understand this current crisis of the nation-state some academics make comparisons with the Middle Ages. According to Immanuel Wallerstein the current crises signify the transition from one structural TimeSpace to another. This is, according to him, comparable to the crisis at the end of the Middle Ages which marked the emergence of the current capitalist world-system. Based on an elaboration of Braudel’s famous distinction between three forms of time, Immanuel Wallerstein distinguishes five different TimeSpaces.3 The first type, “eternal TimeSpace,” is characterized by explanations that disregard the specificities of time and space. This search for general laws of behaviour has dominated the social sciences until recently. They conceptualized social change as eternal progress starting in the Dark Ages. The world-systems approach criticizes this search for universal laws, but also seeks to go beyond the analysis of particular events and places of the “episodic TimeSpace.” It therefore focuses on the TimeSpaces between these two extremes to analyze the relationship between worldwide developments and specific events. Each world-system forms a “structural TimeSpace,” with fundamentally different operating principles and developmental paths. These structures are quite persistent and change only gradually through successive “cyclico-ideo­logical TimeSpaces.” These political and economic cycles rise and decline with the more linear development of the “structural TimeSpace” of the current capitalist world-economy. For instance, the ever-present competition between states generates cycles with alternating periods of rivalry and peace, which structurally increase state power over time. The transition from one structural TimeSpace to another constitutes a “transformational TimeSpace.” These are unique occurrences at the right time and place, when one “structural TimeSpace” succeeds another; these are the rare moments when free will can shape the future organization of society. For example, the capitalist world-economy was

2  Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford, 2004); David Held, Anthony McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate (Cam­bridge, 2000); Andrés Rodrí�guez-Pose and Richard Sandall, “From identity to the economy: Analyzing the evolution of the decentralization discourse,” in Environment and Planning C 26 (2008), 54–72; Michael Keating, The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change (Cheltenham, 1998). 3  Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Inventions of TimeSpace Realities: Towards an Understanding of our Historical Systems,” Geo­graphy 73 (1988): 289–97; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Time of Space and the Space of Time: The Future of Social Science,” Political Geo­graphy 17 (1998): 71–82.



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a new “structural TimeSpace” that emerged out of the late-medi­eval crisis of feudalism in Northwestern Europe. A large-scale and expanding division of labour based on market competition replaced the coercion-based local division of labour which characterized the Middle Ages. Wallerstein compares this crisis of the Middle Ages, from which the modern world-system with its nation-states emerged, with the current crises of the world-system and the nation-states, which can result in yet another fundamentally different “structural TimeSpace.”4 Saskia Sassen’s studies on the relation between globalization and the transformation of the nation-state make a more detailed comparison of the current crisis with the crisis in the Middle Ages. It can help to avoid what Saskia Sassen calls the endogeneity trap of limiting analyses to the subject studied. “[W]e cannot understand the x—in this case globalization—by confining our study to the characteristics of the x itself—i.e., global processes and institutions.”5 Analyses of globalization should thus not be limited to burgeoning worldwide trade, new communication techno­logies, emerging global institutions, the growth of transnational corporations, and the decline of the nation-state since the 1980s. The local scale and a longer timeframe are necessary to better understand globalization. To avoid the endogeneity trap one must look beyond simple dualities of scale and time. Studying the different relations between the local and many other scales avoids the scale-duality between the national and the global. Studying the period before, during, and after the golden age of the nation-state, avoids the time-duality which contrasts the period of the nation-state with the current period of globalization.6 The nation-state is not a kind of primordial condition now challenged by globalization. There were also important long-distance relations before the period of the nationstate. This does not suggest there are no fundamental changes between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries.7 Analyzing earlier periods gives a much more nuanced and complex picture than models of current social change, which are typically geared toward isolating key variables to create order where none is seen. […] Looking at this earlier phase is a way of raising the level of complexity in the inquiry about current transformations.8

History is important to understand the continuities and changes of the building blocks on which is based the construction of the general structure of these periods. Saskia Sassen uses the organization of territories, authority, and rights to show how transhistorical components are assembled into different historical formations.9 Each new 4  Wallerstein, “The Inventions of TimeSpace Realities,” 289–97; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Time of Space,” 71–82. 5  Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medi­eval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, 2008), 4. 6  Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 394.

7  Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974). 8  Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 11.

9  Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 4.

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phase reassembles the constituent elements of the previous period in a new way. To understand globalization it is therefore important to study the evolution of these building blocks and how they take form as the nation-state and globalization.10 She therefore gives a lot of attention to the transformation of the societal and spatial order from the Middle Ages to the nation-state based constellation of land, authority, and rights, to better understand the formation of the emerging global assemblage.

The Role of National Identity in the Legitimation of Political Power

One aspect of this societal transformation is the declining role of the nation and national identity in the legitimation of political power. This section discusses the importance of the nation in the legitimation of power. The next section shows how the nation is undermined. This fragmentation results in the formation of newer and “thinner” forms of regional identity. The chapter’s last section shows how these thin identities are reinforced through the use of iconic places frequently linked to the Middle Ages. According to David Beetham, a leading political philosopher and political theorist on the legitimation of power, legitimacy is based on the correspondence between the norms prevalent in a community and how power is exercised.11 According to Beetham, legitimacy is based on the coherent but changeable combination of three dimensions: legality, expressed consent, and justifiability. Legality refers to adherence to the established rules of acquiring and exercising power. The expressed consent of the population with the power structures in society is either mobilized, through oaths and participation in mass events, or results from elections. Justifiability is based on social norms on the source of political authority and the purpose of government. Power “must derive from a source that is acknowledged as authoritative within society; it must serve ends that are recognized as socially necessary, and interests that are general.”12 Justifiability is not only based on the source, but also on how regulation serves a shared communal interest. This socially-specific defined common interest should be met by an adequate and efficient performance of the political system.13 This common interest is linked to the values and identity of that community. [T]he legitimation of power rules is not only the development and dissemination of an appropriate body of ideas, or ideo­logy, but the construction of a social identity by a complex set of often unconscious processes, which make that identity seem “natural,” and give the justifying ideas their plausibility.14

The identity of communities is linked to the spaces they inhabit. Traditional identities are strongly rooted in the history of a community in a fixed territory. These identities focus on stability and cohesion rooted in victories and defeats during their long history, 10  Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 13.

11  David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Basingstoke, 1991), 8.

12  Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 149.

13  Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 70 and 86. 14  Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 78.



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the characteristics of the land like landscape and iconic buildings, the characteristics of the population, and their political, cultural, and economic achievements. These collective identities are based on the interplay between the conceived identity of the inhabitants and the communicated identity of the rulers. Traditional collective identities take many generations to solidify into thick identities like national identities. They are rooted in a long political history linked to the development of the nation-state. In the modern age the nation has become the community on which legitimate power is based.15 The “political conception of the general interest becomes confined to the boundaries of the nation-state.”16 The nation was more a normative ideal than an empirical reality: The idea of “identity,” and a “national identity” in particular, did not gestate and incubate in human experience “naturally,” did not emerge out of that experience as a self-evident “fact of life.” That idea was forced into the Lebenswelt of modern men and women—and arrived as a fiction. It congealed into a “fact,” a “given,” precisely because it had been a fiction.17

The national community was imagined to unite the hierarchy of traditional local and regional communities.18 Their identities were not erased, but transformed into a layered national identity. Some local and regional characteristics were uploaded to the national level in the construction of a national identity.19 Those characteristics of local and regional identities which corresponded with the desired national identity were emphasized to create a national identity discourse stressing the national unity in diversity. The communication of a British identity, for instance, highlighted local elements like iconic buildings in London, the architecture of which embodied the British destiny of empire and the Arcadian south-eastern countryside, exemplifying the long historic roots of industrious labour and homeliness.20 The nation-state communicated a new overarching national identity by the selective uploading of elements of traditional local identities in their representations of national identity. But the construction of national identities was more than a simple widening circle of identification or an uploading of some aspects of local and regional identity to the national level. This involves more than a simple imposition of new identity using static local elements. There is a discursive interaction between discourses of regional uniqueness and those of national unity. For instance, in nineteenth-century Germany the concept of Heimat was initially used by local elites in their ideo­logical opposition to 15  Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 75.

16  Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 250.

17  Zygmund Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi (Cam­bridge, 2004), 20.

18  Bauman, Identity: Conversations, 77.

19  Brian Graham, Greg Ashworth, and John Tunbridge, A Geo­graphy of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London, 2000), 85 and 182.

20  Felix Driver and David Gilbert, “Heart of Empire? Landscape, Space and Performance in Imperial London,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998): 11–28; David Gilbert, “‘London in all its glory—or how to enjoy London’: guidebook representations of imperial London,” Journal of Historical Geo­graphy 25 (1999): 279–97; David Lowenthal, “British National Identity and the English Landscape,” Rural History 2 (1991): 205–30.

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modernization which threatened the traditional, local social and eco­logical structures going back to the Middle Ages. They wanted to protect their traditional rural way of life against industrialization and urbanization. Initially they focused on preserving their local heritage, like old medi­eval buildings, city walls, and monuments. They were not only concerned with the beautification of their townscapes, but the romanticized beauty of unspoiled nature was also important for the identity of the different Heimats. Their opposition to modernity became after the end of the nineteenth century an important component of an increasingly dominant conservative interpretation of German nationalism. The initial opposition between individual Heimats and modernity in general was transformed into hostility between the German national identity and the Western European variant of modernity. The German nation was conceptualized as a mosaic of different Heimats where the general German culture was rooted in historically grown specific regional identities. Regional Heimat identities thus increasingly reinforced German national identity.21 Thus the initial opposition between the local Heimat and Germany’s national development was transformed by using these Heimats in the construction of a German national identity and the articulation of a national path to modernity in opposition to other nations, especially West European ones.22 For the incomplete nation of 1871, the invented traditions of the Heimat bridged the gap between national aspiration and provincial reality. These efforts might be called federalist, in the sense that Heimat enthusiasts celebrated German diversity. They supported national cohesion without necessarily showing any enthusiasm for its symbols or for its agents, Prussia and the national government.23

The Undermining of Traditional Collective Identities Traditional forms of identity are based on stable regional communities with collective identities passed on to the next generations. This is now undermined by the scaling up of social and economic relations. The position of regions in the international division of labour becomes more changeable. The rapidly changing functional shape of regions undermines regional institutionalization. Transformations of the state organization, through for instance the creation of new regions by changing administrative borders and the emergence of new forms of administrative cooperation, further undermine established regions. There is less and less time for regional identities to become established in the population. Globalization also dramatically extends the reach of social net-

21  Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Will Cremer and Ansgar Klein, eds., Heimat: Analyses, Themen, Perspektiven (Bielefeld, 1990); Karl Ditt, “Die deutsche Heimatbewegung 1871–1945,” in Heimat: Analyses, Themen, Perspektiven, ed. Will Cremer and Ansgar Klein (Bielefeld, 1990), 135–54; Willfried Spohn, “Continuities and changes of Europe in German national identity,” in The Meaning of Europe: Variety and Contention Within and Among Nations, ed. Mikael Malmborg and Bo Stråth (Oxford, 2002), 285–309.

22  Vanessa Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland zwischen Reichs­ tradition und Westorientierung (1920–1970) (Munich, 2005); Spohn, “Continuities and changes of Europe,” 285–309. 23  Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 13.



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works. Together with the individualization of society this transforms social networks and identity formation. “We replace the few depth relationships with a mass of thin and shallow contacts.”24 The small stable local networks in which individuals were bound together with multiple bonds of kinship, friendship, work, church, and mutual care disappear. These social ties are still important for individuals, but become more separated from each other. Individuals increasingly choose with whom they have what kind of relation. The bonds in these individual-centred social networks are weaker and more changeable. These individual networks are larger than traditional networks and the overlap between them decreases. The stable collective network is broken up into many changeable individual networks. Individual choice, rather than collective conventions and spatial proximity, now determines social networks.25 Liquefaction takes the place of social frameworks and institutions. Stable collective identities are replaced by chosen, fluid, and temporary individual identities. “In the brave new world of fleeting chances and frail securities, the old-style stiff and non-negotiable identities simply won’t do.”26 Discussing and communicating identities becomes more important while in the current phase of liquid modernity identities are undermined. Identities are sometimes temporarily fixed but are lighter than traditional identities, and thus changed more easily.27 Conflicts especially can temporarily strengthen communities. Shared identities are usually mobilized when interdependencies cause problems as when, for instance, economic restructuring affects specific areas.28 Despite the decline in the localized nature of social networks, residents are still in many ways interdependent. Living together in space makes them interdependent for their quality of life.29 Proximity, propinquity,30 or throwntogetherness,31 are the foundation of many temporary spatial identifications. Shared interests in a specific place and at a specific moment can create a new, but transitory, regional identity. The relation between identity and space, never straightforward, is thus now further complicated through individualization, migration, economic changes, and political rescaling. These new forms of transient regional identities emerge not only spontaneously, but are also intentionally created to mobilize support. New forms of regional cooperation especially lack institutionalized power, depending more on voluntary support from regional stakeholders. Occasionally they can mobilize support based on existing estab24  Bauman, Identity: Conversations, 69.

25  Talja Blokland, Urban Bonds (Cam­bridge, 2003); Bauman, Identity: Conversations; Zygmund Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cam­bridge, 2001).

26  Bauman, Identity: Conversations, 27.

27  Bauman, Identity: Conversations, 13–46.

28  Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cam­bridge, 2002); Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian J. Longhurst, Globalization and Belonging (London, 2005), 56; Andrew Donaldson, “Performing Regions: Territorial Development and Cultural Politics in a Europe of the Regions,” Environment and Planning A 38 (2006): 2075–92. 29  Blokland, Urban Bonds, 78–79.

30  Amin, Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban.

31  Doreen Massey, For Space (London, 2005).

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lished regional identities, but this is usually very problematic. First of all, established regional identities are now being undermined by globalization and individualization. Secondly, the spatial shapes of these new forms of regional cooperation rarely coincide with established regions. Thirdly, these new regions are so new and unstable that they don’t have the time to institutionalize and develop a distinct traditional regional identity. Finally, the multitude of partially overlapping and competing new regions hinder the development of their identity. For instance, the larger Dutch municipalities participate in dozens of different forms of regional cooperation. In contrast to historically grown and culturally based traditional regions with broad and stable identities fixed to a given territory, these new regions have more fluid identities linked to specific policies.

From Thick to Thin Regional Identities

To better understand and analyze the relation between these fluid new forms of regional identity and the more traditional forms, we can make an ideal typical distinction between traditional “thick” and new “thin” forms of regional identity. Weberian ideal types are analytical concepts which in their purity do not exist in complex reality. Ideal types are not constructed to describe reality in its complexity, but to better understand the different mechanisms which form reality. Ideal types incorporate these different aspects in their logically pure form.32 Thin and thick are sometimes used as metaphors to characterize these changing social relations. Anton Zijderveld uses them to analyze the changing role of institutions and networks: Today thick, greedy and closed institutions, conditioned by a heavy handed, often religiously and magically tabooed, coercive tradition, have been superseded by thinner, more voluntary, more open, and looser institutions which in the behaviour of people are often alternated or temporarily suspended by flexible networks.33

The distinction between thick and thin identity is also sometimes made. Thick identity is based more on a shared culture and community relations. Thin identity is related more to a specific problem and requires less direct involvement with other individuals. Thick identities have a normative aspect, while thin identities are more practical and utilitarian.34 Thick identities are more fixed and rooted in culture and history, while thin identities are more fluid and based on dialogue.35 The ideal typical opposition between thick and thin regional identities can also be linked to other differences between traditional and new regions. Jones and MacLeod 32  Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Sozio­logie (Tübingen, 1980).

33  Anton C. Zijderveld, The Institutional Imperative: The Interface of Institutions and Networks (Amsterdam, 2000), 128.

34  Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Harvard, 2005); Lawrence Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory (Belmont, 2003). 35  Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford, Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization (London, 2005), 68–86.



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differentiate between spaces of regionalism and regional spaces.36 Spaces of regionalism are culturally based political movements seeking to increase the political autonomy of traditional territories. Regional spaces provide the institutional context which influences regional economic development. Thick regional identities value the region as a political goal in itself, while thin regional identities are based more on a utilitarian legitimation of the effectiveness of specific economic policies. Thin regional identities are more functional and linked to sectoral policies and special interests, while thick regional identities are more integrative. Balancing the different interests of all inhabitants of a territory and integrating different policies in a given territory is based on sharing a stable thick regional identity. Thin regional identities focus on only a few, mostly economic, characteristics, while thick regional identities cover a broad range of cultural, social, political, environmental, and economic characteristics. The following table presents an ideal typical overview of the differences between thick and thin regional identities.37

ASPECT

Ranging from thick...

...to thin

Spatial form

Closed

Open

Organization

Institutionalized

Project

Purpose

Broad and many

Participants Time

Territorial

General population Culture

Defensive

Historical oriented Stable

Scale focus

Old

Local and National

Network Administrators and specific stakeholders Single

Economy

Offensive

Future oriented Change New

Global

Legitimation is always based on a combination of backward-looking rights and forward-looking provision of public interests.38 Max Weber makes a similar distinction, but relates it to his theoretical distinction between traditional and bureaucratic types of legitimation.39 Traditional and bureaucratic legitimation forms ideal typical dualities which, although logically distinct, are combined in the politics of the nation-state. Traditional legitimation is based on the idea of an historically-based just rule. Its high 36  Martin Jones and Gordon MacLeod, “Regional Spaces, Spaces of Regionalism: Territory, Insur­ gent Politics and the English Question,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geo­graphers 29 (2004): 433–52 at 435. 37  Source: Kees Terlouw, “Rescaling Regional Identities: Communicating Thick and Thin Regional Identities,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 9 (2009): 452–64.

38  Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 137.

39  Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 20 and 822.

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moral value is based on its long-established rule. Whereas traditional legitimation is based on morality (wertrational), bureaucratic legitimation is based on efficiency (zweckrational). Bureaucratic legitimation is based on the impersonal rule of law to achieve agreed upon ends. Thus, while traditional legitimation is based on past success, bureaucratic legitimation is based on future results.40 These backward-looking traditional and forward-looking bureaucratic types of legitimation can be linked to the aforementioned thick and thin regional identities. Many traditional established regions, like Catalonia and Scotland, link their thin futureoriented regional identities with a thick identity rooted in history. Newer forms of regional cooperation, like the Ruhr area in Germany or the Randstad in the Netherlands, try to thicken their thin economic regional identity by referring to the glorious past before the administrations in these regions started to cooperate. They do this to widen their base of support and legitimation from policy makers to the general population.41 Regional administrations sometimes use different regional identities for different audiences. Thin regional identities focusing on economic competitiveness are used to attract outside investors, while thick regional identities are used to conceal the drawbacks of these neoliberal policies for the general population by using an ideo­logy focusing on the shared interest of all members of a territorial community.42 New policies are more easily legitimized using thin identities, but need to be linked to the thicker regional identities held by the population.

Backward and Forward-Looking Iconic Places: Heritage Sites and Flagship Projects

Administrations justify their policies by connecting different types of identities focusing on different spatial scales. They especially try to connect new (inter)nationally formulated policies to the more limited scales with which populations identify. Widely known and valued iconic places can create important links between these layers of identities. Iconic sites are not a separate scale level but are an element of the identities of multiple scales.43 Iconic sites link identities across scales as part of a multilevel identity. Iconic places were important for the partial incorporation of established regional identities into the emerging national level. “Historically, national icons start their careers as local icons in important cities where holders of economic or political or culture-ideo­logy power were based.”44 Specific places within a region are very important for the formation of shared feelings of belonging. These places can become icons representing the characteristics of the whole region and the values of the whole community. “Iconic places tell us where we 40  Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 124.

41  Kees Terlouw, “From Thick to Thin Regional Identities?,” Geojournal 77, no. 5 (2011): 707–21.

42  Kevin R. Cox, “Ideo­logy and the Growth Coalition,” in The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives, Two Decades Later, ed. Andrew E. G. Jonas and David Wilson (New York, 1999), 21–36. 43  Julie Cidell, “The Place of Individuals in the Politics of Scale,” Area 38 (2006): 196–203.

44  Leslie Sklair, “Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization,” City 10 (2006): 21–47 at 40.



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are, at a glance.”45 Such places can be both well-known landmarks and have a special symbolic significance. These can be stereotypical places representing general characteristics of a nation or unique places which express a special meaning, incorporating important values for a specific community in a specific period linked to a particular region.46 These iconic places make regions recognizable for inhabitants and others. They strengthen the link between space and community. Iconic places also incorporate and communicate the values of that community. They are not just important cultural spaces but can also be important for the legitimation of power. Heritage sites are widely used to symbolize the durability and legitimacy of the nation-state through their roots in a glorious past.47 The interpretation of the glorious past focuses on those values which are useful to legitimate the current regime using tradition. Heritage sites are frequently transformed for this purpose. The passage from the ordinary world to the heritage site may be demarcated through, for instance, signs and fences. The removal of new elements further strengthen the experience of visiting the past in the present. The mysterious world of the Middle Ages is especially attractive for the post-modern individual. Trips to heritage sites may also serve as a distraction or refuge from the monotony of everyday life.48 Heritage sites not only link the present with the past but the timeline is frequently linked to the future. The Janus face of looking back and looking forwards in time using both a mythical history and the promise of a bright future is a common feature of nationalism.49 Heritage sites linked to the poverty of the past or important innovations often form part of a discourse of national development. The national path of development is extended from a poor past, through the wealthy present, to an even better future. The memory of some medi­eval “Dark Ages” is an important element in this discourse of national development. We have seen how the past is interpreted to legitimize future-oriented policies. “Heritage is used with an eye to the future,”50 or “heritage is a view from the present, either backward to a past or forward to a future.”51 In the next para­graph the same scholars, 45  Sklair, “Iconic Architecture,” 40.

46  Sklair, “Iconic Architecture”; Leslie Sklair, “Iconic Architecture and the Culture-Ideo­logy of Consumerism,” Theory, Culture & Society 27 (2010): 135–59. 47  David C. Harvey, “The History of Heritage,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Aldershot, 2008), 19–36; Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London, 2006); Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge, A Geo­graphy of Heritage.

48  Smith, Uses of Heritage, 30–31 and 82; Harvey, “The History of Heritage,” 19–36; David Lowen­ thal, “Natural and Cultural Heritage,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11 (2005): 81–92 at 82.

49  Eric Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cam­bridge, 1990); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986); Tom Nairn, “The Modern Janus,” New Left Review 94 (1975): 3–30; Colin Flint and Peter J. Taylor, Political Geo­graphy: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality (Harlow, 2011). 50  Harvey, “The History of Heritage,” 19.

51  Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge, A Geo­graphy of Heritage, 2.

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Figure 18.1: Legitimation through backward and forward selectivity of iconic sites. Looking backwards from the future is partially based on Dirk Spennemann’s ideas on selecting new objects as the heritage for the future.52

however, define “heritage as the contemporary use of the past.”53 This, at best, partial attention to the future is, however, still linked to historic sites. Although the social functions of heritage and even the view of the past is incorporated into the analysis of how heritage is presented and is now the focus of most heritage studies, the objects studied are still the old heritage sites. Other sites are less obviously future-oriented, with a similar legitimating function as traditional heritage sites. The function of the backwards time-travel of heritage sites away from ordinary daily life54 can be reversed to timetravel forwards if we examine recently built flagship projects. The better future already visible in flagship projects provides administrations with a bureaucratic legitimation, showing the population how its rule will further improve daily life in the future. Bureaucratic legitimation focuses on efficiency and future results. It mobilizes public approval by communicating its vision of the future through the construction of flagship projects where the better future of tomorrow is already visible and visitable today.55 The figure below shows the relations between the present and the past of heritage sites and the relations between the present and the future of flagship projects. Present political power is legitimized through both the historio­graphical interpretation of the past and the imagined future communicated in policy scenarios. Heritage sites are the result of both the preservation of old artefacts and interpretations from the present. Contemporary political power is legitimized in a historio­graphical discourse in which the preservation and interpretation of heritage sites is embedded. Bureaucratic legitimation mirrors traditional legitimation in its use of the future. Administrations use scenarios in policy documents to present the ideal future in which long-term policy goals like the transition towards more sustainable forms of development are realized. Flagship projects are conceptualized by looking back from this long-term ideal future to the short-term of the construction of such projects in the present. Flagship projects 52

52  Dirk H. R. Spennemann, “On the Cultural Heritage of Robots,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 13 (2007): 4–21. 53  Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge, A Geo­graphy of Heritage, 2. 54  Smith, Uses of Heritage, 72–74 and 82.

55  Kees Terlouw, “Charisma and Space,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 10 (2010): 335–48.



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are legitimized from the ideal future formulated by the administration. But flagship projects themselves are also used to legitimize the ideal future presented in policy scenarios by linking them to the present political situation where the established identities of the population are an important source for legitimacy. Viewed from the future, flagship projects are very similar to heritage sites. Whereas heritage sites mark important historic events, flagship projects mark recent policy changes towards a different future. Viewed from the ideal future presented in policy documents, the construction of flagship projects are important markers of the transition towards the future. While heritage sites present a selective interpretation of the past to legitimize current policies, flagship projects are based on the selective imagination of the future to legitimize new policies.

Conclusion

The memory of the Middle Ages is frequently used to better understand and legitimize the new political order in which the power of the nation-state is challenged from above by globalization and from below by regionalization and individualization. Some, like Wallerstein and Sassen, focus on comparing the fundamental transformation from medi­eval society to modern society with the current societal transformation linked with globalization. Sassen in particular compares the current political fragmentation with the situation in the Middle Ages. Both in the Middle Ages and in current political systems one has to deal with complex, multiple, competing, and overlapping sources of power. In both periods cities and regions have considerable autonomy over central state authority. These centrifugal forces challenge the legitimacy of the political system based on the coherence between collective identity and political territory. New forms of spatial identities are needed to legitimize and stabilize this fragmenting political system. Regions therefore are becoming more numerous and important, relying more and more on future-oriented thin regional identities. But in order to legitimize their political decisions they have to link these thin identities with historically-rooted thick identities. Iconic places connecting the past, on which thick identities are based, and the future, on which thin identities are based, help to legitimize the current spatially fragmented political structures. The memory of the Middle Ages is thus being used to strengthen an identification with the political system in these globalizing and individualizing times.

Chapter 19

THE HEGEMONY OF THE CULT OF ANNIVERSARIES AND ITS DISADVANTAGES FOR HISTORIANS WILLIAM M. JOHNSTON

I wish to

address in this chapter the disadvantages for historians of the cult of anniversaries in Europe today. In 1989 I wrote Celebrations: The Cult of Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today,1 which was reprinted in June 2011. A French translation appeared in 1992.2 Let me begin by summarizing some of my earlier views about cultural celebrations. They help to explain why I have been invited here to present my critique of how the cult of anniversaries distorts historians’ prioritizing. There is no need to remind you that historical commemorations like that of Charles V in the millennial year 2000, of Frédéric Chopin in 2010, and of both Franz Liszt and Gustav Mahler in 2011 flourished more than ever. What has been called the “cult of anniversaries” consists of an expectation that the years of birth and/or death of cultural luminaries must be celebrated through events and publications financed out of the cultural budgets of nations, regions, cities, and private foundations. The same applies to fiftieth and hundredth anniversaries of political and military events, as in 2011 with the American Civil War that began in 1861. The readiness of European institutions to invest large sums in commemorations of cultural, as distinct from political, anniversaries astonishes North Americans like me. We Americans treat such occasions with mild interest or even indifference, and our commemorations of cultural heroes—even major ones like Abraham Lincoln, who was born just over two hundred years ago in 1809—are far more modest than those in Europe. Contrasts in the intensity of exploitation of historical anniversaries have become a major point of difference between Europe and North America. In Celebrations: The Cult of Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today, I explored reasons for differences between European and American habits of commemoration. I connected Europe’s acceleration in numbers and panache of anniversary festivals to the phenomenon of secularization. The decline in religious modes of remembering has, I then argued, left a vacuum which is increasingly filled by festivals whose timing is dictated solely by the calendar. At first glance, the willingness of cultural pro*  This chapter is based on the paper presented at the congress “Memory in the Middle Ages” held in Lleida in June 2011 as part of the first International Medi­eval Meeting Lleida.

1  William M. Johnston, Celebrations: The Cult of Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today (New Brunswick, 1991). 2  William M. Johnston, Postmodernisme et bimillénaire (Paris, 1992).

William M. Johnston ([email protected]) is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the Uni­ver­sity of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.

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grammers to rely so heavily on the calendar of anniversaries seems timid and arbitrary. But a closer look shows that the Great Calendar of birth and death dates provides predictability, stability, and consensus. It lifts the timing of commemorations beyond dispute. For some decades now, European planners have felt no need to justify investment in anniversary celebrations because the calendar does the justifying. Assent to lavish expenditure which taxpayers might refuse to politicians they will concede to dictates of the calendar. My hypothesis in Celebrations was that post-industrial society must fashion for itself psycho­logical involvement in the past. A sense of participation in one’s country’s past is no longer inherited, and therefore must be cultivated by cultural entrepreneurs. I hypothesized, moreover, an inherent human need for marking events within the cycle of years, decades, and centuries. Whereas formerly religious ceremonies conducted within a liturgical calendar met this need, now the need for marking special days is met through cultural commemorations. In homage to the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and his notion of homo ludens,3 I adopted the phrase homo rhythmicus to denote a human need to punctuate with celebrations one’s passage through a lifetime. References to homo rhythmicus—that devotee of calendar-dictated celebrations—will crop up throughout this chapter. In 1999 I was invited to address a conference planning the five-hundredth anniversary of Emperor Charles V held in Brussels on his 499th birthday on February 24. On that occasion I expanded my argument as follows. I proposed two new hypotheses to explain the proliferation of cultural anniversaries in Europe. I applied ideas put forward by two cultural anthropo­logists who, as it happens, were born in the same year, 1920. One is French, Georges Balandier (1920–2016), who in the 1980s elaborated the notion of the “theatricalization of politics.” The other is the Scottish-American, Victor Turner (1920–1983), who in the 1960s and 1970s re-interpreted phenomena of initiation or “rite of passage.” Let me give a very brief synopsis of my Brussels lecture. It will show how the cult of anniversaries exemplifies both what Balandier calls the “theatricalization of politics” and what Turner calls the quest for “spontaneous communitas,” by which he means intense but transient bonding with strangers during moments of disruption, whether planned or unplanned. To use Balandier’s phrase, cultural commemorations “theatricalize” the process of communal remembering, just as in Turner’s phrase commemorations promote a fleeting sense of community (or as he said communitas) by generating moments when people stand together outside time’s flow and enjoy it. Turner coined the technical term “liminality” to denote this experience of tremulous immersion in the moment. Let me first introduce Georges Balandier’s concept of the theatricalization of politics. Balandier did his formative research in French West African colonies (Senegal) right after World War Two. There he observed the tendency of tribal peoples to ritualize political events such as disputes over succession of power. A tendency of tribes to enact 3  Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. Versuch einer Bestimmung des Spielelements der Kultur (Gro­ ningen, 1938).

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ceremonies in situations where Europeans would debate policy or enforce laws alerted Balandier to what he would later call the “theatricalization of politics.” A familiar example of the phenomenon of “theatricalization of politics” came as an innovation in the late 1960s. Protesters started to mount political demonstrations solely so that the “event” could be filmed for broadcast on television. If no television cameraman came, no demonstration took place. As we now know, to have a demonstration televised provides a substitute satisfaction, even if no law is changed and no one’s opinion is altered. To dramatize one’s stance via the media gratifies a need for political participation. During the late 1960s, the European and American Left substituted dramatizing for negotiating, and this preference became a principle of conduct. Institutions too rigid to change could be ridiculed by theatricalizing protest against them. By 1980, theatricalizing was becoming more important than any changes it instigated, as politics in post-industrial societies moved toward providing not only government but also entertainment. The cult of anniversaries began to expand in Europe during the very same years as did the theatricalizing of politics—namely the 1970s and 1980s. Anniversary celebrations mobilize a similar willingness to substitute momentary effects for permanent ones. In a commemoration as in a stage-play, success is gauged by the degree of theatrical skill, by the size and enthusiasm of the audience, and by the quality of the reviews. Success is not gauged by how a commemoration reshapes understanding for years to come or by whether it leaves a legacy such as a building or an educational enterprise. Moreover, there is no rating system for comparing commemorations across the decades. Indeed, many commemorations, perhaps most, prove just as ephemeral as political demonstrations. Each is likely to be upstaged by a successor, and few if any chroniclers keep a record of every one of a year’s commemorations (or of a year’s protest demonstrations). There are too many of both. Although commemorations purport to cultivate cultural memories that deserve to endure—as with celebrations of Charles V, Cervantes, or Goethe—commemorations themselves prove anything but enduring. Moreover, by theatricalizing historical memory, commemorations tend to ephemeralize certain values which many people might otherwise regard as enduring. As a consequence of theatricalization, the process of commemorating itself comes to be substituted for a more lasting product such as a literary masterpiece or a major work of art. The process of commemorating becomes a goal in itself as each anniversary flares up for a moment and then disappears. It is this unceasing cascade of commemorations which needs to be explained.

Paradoxes of the Theatricalization of Memory

Before I offer any explanation, let me examine three paradoxes that ensue from the theatricalization of historical memory. The first two of these anomalies surface during nearly every major cultural anniversary. We historians collude in fostering these paradoxes and their consequences. The meeting held in Lleida in 2011 and the discussions in the present book seem an ideal occasion to voice distress at what I see as incompatibilities between historians’ conscience and the theatricalizing of remembrance.

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To state my first paradox, let me ask, what is the opposite of theatricalization of memory? What would be a minimally theatricalized approach to historical memory? I would answer: A sober, even a cruel analysis of causes and their consequences, one which explodes myths and challenges or destroys cherished identities. If sufficiently iconoclastic, such an analysis will forbid any celebration. I cite as an example of such an uncelebratable event certain actions of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. Please note it is not Franco himself who cannot be theatricalized but rather certain consequences of his actions. Here then is my piece of repugnant analysis, which recounts a turn of events no one will wish to commemorate. Because of that reluctance, these events are seldom if ever discussed. We all know that between 1936 and 1939, the Spanish Civil War ravaged Spain. Worse, it encouraged the dictators Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin; it demoralized France and Britain; and later it resulted in the ostracism of Spain from the rest of Europe until at least the late 1960s. Nearly everyone thinks of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, won by General Franco, as a disaster not only for Spain but also for Europe. The following argumentation reverses this judgement, however, and does so in a way that will please no one. Let us imagine for a moment that Franco’s Falangists had lost the Spanish Civil War and that in 1938 or 1939 they had retreated back to North Africa. How would a victorious Spanish Republic have fared in 1940? After Hitler had conquered France in May and June of 1940, he would almost certainly not have stopped at the Pyrenees but instead would have felt obliged to conquer Republican Spain as well. Can anyone suppose that Hitler’s armies would have failed to do so? If Hitler had captured Gibraltar and then held it during 1941 and 1942, the Allies would have been unable to send an invasion fleet through the Straits of Gibraltar to relieve Egypt or recapture North Africa. It becomes likely that Hitler could have dominated the entire Mediterranean simply by virtue of holding Gibraltar. Who or what was responsible for precluding this disaster? There is only one possible answer, however repellent it may be: the victory of Franco’s Army over the Spanish Republicans in 1939. Franco’s dictatorship prevented Hitler from seizing Gibraltar. It can be argued therefore that Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War supplied one of the necessary conditions for the victory of the Allies over Hitler during World War Two. As I said, no one will wish to commemorate that achievement, or perhaps even to notice it, but we all stand in debt to Franco for having frustrated Hitler. Such a piece of historical analysis, I submit, cannot be theatricalized. This is partly because the analysis yields a repugnant conclusion and partly because the reasoning rests on a “might-havebeen” or on what we historians call a “counter-factual.” In general, hypotheses based on contrary-to-fact argumentation fall outside the realm of what can be theatricalized. Likewise, we seldom commemorate acts of war or diplomacy simply on the grounds that they prevented disasters. Homo rhythmicus has no interest in counter-factuals. The first paradox of the theatricalization of memory is that it excludes from discussion any reasoning about might-have-beens. Only certain types of phenomena can be theatricalized, and conclusions based on contrary-to-fact analysis are not one of them. Thus theatricalizing of historical memory narrows the range of what is likely to be discussed. A second paradox will trouble teachers of history. It concerns the interaction between what British theorists of cultural remembering like David Lowenthal call “heri-

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tage” and the study of history. To coin an epigram, commemorations aspire to substitute memories of newly staged events for memories of the events being commemorated. In the wake of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, for example, most French people now remember some of the theatricalizations that took place then more vividly than they do the events of the Revolution itself. A kind of Gresham’s law prevails, as re-enactments (a cheaper currency) replace memories based on reading of documents (a rarer currency). After a massive commemoration it may become harder to disseminate sober analysis of the commemorated events and persons than it was before. Theatricalizing may muddy the waters so that iconoclastic or path-breaking interpretations become harder to launch, if only because there is more data to compete with. For example, 2011 marked the hundredth anniversary of the death of the composer Gustav Mahler. During this year it was not easy to publish anything about his rivals, like Alexander Zemlinsky, but it was easier than usual to publish sweeping syntheses of Mahler’s achievements. During a massive commemoration, specialist scholars might suffer a temporary eclipse in favour of generalisers—a trend which I favour. My second paradox, then, concerns ways in which theatricalized commemorations widen or narrow an audience’s receptivity. My third paradox, which I present extremely briefly, concerns external factors which may render programmed theatricalizing suddenly irrelevant. The collapse of the Berlin Wall on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1989, upstaged the latter anniversary for all time. Kristallnacht will never again be remembered as readily as it was before 1989. Likewise, during 2000, the Bimillennium upstaged whatever other anniversaries were celebrated that year, including the one for Emperor Charles V. I now want to examine this question in greater depth.

How Does the Theatricalizing of Politics Promote the Theatricalizing of Anniversaries?

I am going to ask the following questions insistently, for I am not yet satisfied with my previous answers to them. Why is it that in Europe governmental bodies at the level of nation, region, and city invest so massively in festivals, films, concerts, and re-enactments to mark each and every cultural anniversary? Why must dates of birth and death unleash a torrent not just of publications and conferences but of re-enactments, pageants, films, exhibitions, and other activities of the heritage industry? Why, moreover, does academic discourse by itself not satisfy homo rhythmicus? Why must cultural anniversaries expand beyond academia in order to become embodied in virtually every medium and in every locality? Why, in short, must cultural anniversaries themselves be “theatricalized”? A superficial answer will invoke Emperor Nero’s phrase of “bread and circuses.” Is it not a perennial task of government to appease its citizens’ hunger for spectacle? If government-sponsored spectacle celebrates widely venerated heroes and heroines, many observers will say, “So much the better.” Does not the nation-state benefit by channelling fervour into carriers of national identity? When, for example, France honoured the poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) during the centenary of his death in 1991, the

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French Ministry of Culture and Communication targeted young people. Here was a poet of genius who could enlist the identification of the alienated, including drug-users and drop-outs. Selective targeting of constituencies is something civil servants know how to do, and theatricalized anniversaries incite them to display these skills. A more subtle interpretation of “bread-and-circuses” emerges from applying Georges Balandier’s analysis of “political dramaturgy” to the politics of anniversaries. In the book Pouvoir sur scenes,4 the French cultural anthropo­logist applied expertise in African tribal politics to contemporary society. In both kinds of society, he discerned an ongoing interaction between politicians’ intention to impose order and the ever-recurring eruptions of disorder. Balandier characterized, for example, the gradual shift from pre-1789 monarchy to post-1918 democracy as a shift from an older to a newer way of using dramatizations in politics. Older rulers (such as Charles V or Louis XIV) used techniques of dramatization to legitimate long-term tenure, indeed lifelong tenure in office. They cultivated continuity. Today’s leaders, by way of contrast, juggle events each day and each week in ways calculated to convince us that government is innovating in the face of new challenges. Contemporary politicians legitimate their role by appearing to innovate, whereas before 1789, monarchs legitimated their role by appearing to perpetuate tradition. As Balandier phrased it, a fundamental task facing today’s rulers is to impart “a defined and acceptable form to the future.”5 Previous rulers, by way of contrast, aimed to dramatize continuity with their past by invoking loyalty to its store of “symbolic capital.” Today’s rulers conceal their lack of control over present events by dramatizing plans for the future. Today’s political dramaturgy aims to displace attention from incipient disorder today onto plans to impose order tomorrow. No political institution exemplifies this thesis more visibly than the Brussels-based Commission of the European Union. As everyone in the European Union ought to know, theatricalization of politics means dramatizing proposals for the near future as a means of directing attention away from the present. As happens in any suspenseful stageplay or film, theatricalized politics focuses public attention ahead by a few months or a few years so as to reduce anxiety about the present. Present anxieties are muted by the device of anticipating future accomplishments. As anyone can see, the notion of diverting energies away from the present into the near future describes exactly what anniversary celebrations do. When looking forward to the unfolding of anniversary events, citizen–consumers enjoy the illusion that political programmers are fully in charge of contemporary crises. Anniversary celebrations fit Balandier’s analysis all the better because they benefit from careful planning. Perhaps nowhere else in contemporary culture does meticulous planning reap such conspicuous rewards as in the field of commemorations. To persuade citizen–consumers of Europe to focus their attention on Gustav Mahler and Franz Liszt during the year of their commemoration in 2011 exemplifies the administrators’ skill in managing programmed events. Their virtuosity diverts attention away from the 4  Georges Balandier, Le Pouvoir sur scènes (Paris, 1980).

5  Balandier, Le Pouvoir sur scènes, 154.

The Hegemony of the Cult of Anniversaries and its Disadvantages for Historians

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uncontrollable “external” events of “real life.” Financial crises, strikes, and accusations of corruption cannot be programmed out of existence, but their impact can be lessened by deploying cultural sceno­graphy. An analysis of social classes, almost Marxist in character, sheds further light on the appeal of cultural celebrations. Another crucial change from former times is, as Balandier argues, that the consumer has effaced the citizen.6 Bourgeois citizens, now functioning as citizen–consumers, desire to appropriate, or as Balandier says to “decolonize” (or “defeudalize”) the aristocratic past under the guise of “celebrating” it. Balandier describes how bourgeois citizen–consumers manipulate symbols so as to “decolonize” the feudal and aristocratic past through a process of re-appropriating its pivotal figures. To “decolonize” the past is to impose our contemporary modes of interpretation on it. Thereby we substitute our hegemony as interpreters for the celebrands’ hegemony as actors in past events. One message from the Charles V year in 2000 was that his reign no longer stood under the sway of the Emperor or of later generations of historians, but came to stand now under our sway, that is, under the sway of today’s planners, interpreters, and ordinary citizen–consumers. Such a reversal of initiative is enacted during any major anniversary celebration, when either as planners or participants, we claim for ourselves unlimited freedom to interpret—a freedom that once belonged to the persons we are celebrating and their contemporaries. It is our freedom of manoeuvre that now matters, not theirs. By empowering all of us to interpret for ourselves, large-scale celebrations accelerate the process of decolonizing the monarchical and feudal past of Europe.

The Hegemony of the Cult of Anniversaries in 2011

So much for summarizing what I said in 1999. My critique of the cult of anniversaries has intensified over the past ten years. When I revised my thought in 2011 I argued as follows. Without anyone having authorized it, the mechanism of cultural anniversaries has supplanted the function of setting priorities for cultural bureaucracies, academics, museums, musicians, and publishers. Until as late as the 1970s, the function of arbiter of priorities was played by leading intellectuals. Let me name examples of major cultural critics from the 1920s including Ortega and Unamuno in Spain, Valéry and Gide in France, Thomas Mann and Walter Benjamin in Germany, Hofmannsthal in Austria, Croce in Italy, T. S. Eliot in the United Kingdom, and Edmund Wilson in the United States. In the field of medi­eval studies, Fernand Braudel performed this function of what one might call Praeceptor memoriae into the 1960s. No one has replaced such luminaries. Instead the cult of anniversaries has usurped their function of winnowing cultural priorities. Quite suddenly, with the advent of postmodernism after 1980, nearly everyone forgot that such a function ever belonged to major intellectuals. It took less than two generations for the setting of cultural priorities to be mechanized in a way that now commands unthinking consensus. The mechanism of the calendar of anniversaries caters to mass culture. It provides planning horizons for bureaucracies not just years but decades in advance, and it serves to legitimize majority opinion in all fields. Those who suffer 6  Balandier, Le Pouvoir sur scènes, 157.

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acutely from this mechanization include independent minds, subversive groups, and small countries, whose anniversaries command no wider attention. Amid all the hyperbole about public memory, we have forgotten that as little as a generation and a half ago, the prioritizing of memory proceeded in an entirely different way through the judgement of cultural authority figures. The cult of anniversaries has eclipsed any memory of what it supplanted—a sure sign of an unquestioned hegemony. Needless to say, no one will commemorate the loss of independent judgement occasioned by the rise of the cult of anniversaries, for no one event can be said to crystallize this transition. What is to be done? I recommend raising awareness about the mechanization of memory in every possible way. Some of us should publish in advance a calendar of what might be called “counter-anniversaries” of less well-known figures and events. Each year, scholars should announce a list of worthy figures who have had no anniversary in the recent past or await one in the near future. During every anniversary of a major figure, attention should be paid also to his or her adversaries and to any misdeeds. During 2011, for example, the composer Franz Liszt, a master of self-theatricalizing, cried out for counter-commemorations of his vagaries. It is worth pointing out that medi­evalists suffer unfairly from the mechanism of anniversaries because birth dates and publication dates before 1500 are usually approximate. In a word, the prevailing model serves the convenience of historians of the period after 1500 and most of all after 1800. It scarcely functions for any but gigantic figures and events from before 1100. Historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages are shortchanged by the cult of anniversaries. Another abuse is that the electronic media tend to highlight not just anniversary events but previous observances of recent anniversary celebrations as well. This happens for example with television coverage of the end of World War I and World War II or the events of 1989. Television tends to show film not just of the events to be commemorated, but also of previous commemorations of those events. Previous acts of theatricalization are themselves being commemorated. In a word, the mechanism of cultural anniversaries promotes presentism and undercuts subversive acts of memory. Its hegemony is to be combatted by all means available. At the very least, we historians need to become aware how the mechanization of anniversaries is guiding our choice of research topics. The more we become aware of this skewing of priorities, the more we can reconfigure anniversaries so as to broaden their focus and to undermine consensus about what otherwise might seem obvious. We all need to learn how better to use anniversaries to subvert the hegemony of the mass society that favours them.